Nehad Selaiha marvels at the ability of artists to overcome the worst performance conditions As a theatre, Manf hall is a veritable nightmare -- not only for performers and directors, but also for the audience. Tucked away in a narrow lane behind the Circus and the Balloon theatre in Agouza, across the road from the Nile, it consists of a walled-in rectangular courtyard, with a two-storey line of whitewashed offices and shabby storerooms on three sides and a plain wooden platform on the fourth that serves as a makeshift stage whenever the need arises. On such occasions, the ground is spread over with rugs (that often crumple and trip up the audience in the dark) and rows of ordinary chairs of different styles and sizes (big ones for the important guests, smaller ones for the rest) are placed in front of the stage and removed afterwards. The only touch of beauty in this humble place is provided by two magnificent trees that have been standing there long before the hall existed and still spread their shade over the whole area. In many a performance I watched there, these two glorious trees -- leftovers from what once was a richly green rural area before the hand of 'development' denuded it -- had served as part of the stage sets, or helped to soften the coarseness of clumsily executed ones. At this inauspicious venue, this year's Closing Festival of Theatre Clubs (the 20 th), the last of a series of smaller festivals and competitions held by the Cultural Palaces organisation every year at different times and various regional centres to pick out the best productions by theatre clubs, was held from 23 to 30 September. Such an important annual event that brings to Cairo the best in regional theatre clubs all over the country certainly deserves a better showcase. Formerly, it used to be held at El-Samer theatre, which stood next to the Circus; when El-Samer was pulled down so many years ago to make room for a modern theatrical complex that never materialized, the festival was briefly moved to the Nile Floating Theatre then ended up at Manf Hall. Though the Festival's two former venues were quite primitive and lacking in decent technical equipment, compared to them, Manf Hall is positively a comedown. Over six days, regional directors and their technical crews had to struggle to accommodate their productions in the cramped performance space available at Manf (with no backstage or wings) and cope with its poor and outdated lighting and sound systems (placed in the windows of the ground floor offices overlooking the stage, with the projectors and loudspeakers on the roof), while the actors had to dress, make up and prepare for their parts in two dusty wooden shacks behind the stage. The weather did not help either. Though it was September, it was consistently hot and humid throughout the week. Besides, with two performances scheduled every night, there was hardly enough time for the second performance crew to set the stage and adjust the lighting. Before we speak of artistic quality, we first have to look at the conditions in which artists work. In such conditions as mentioned above, it was a wonder that so many performances could make an impact. Sexual and patriarchal repression and political and economic corruption were the dominant themes in the festival's 12 performances. From Alexandria, which had the lion's share in this event, participating with 4 productions, Tesmaheeli Bil Raqsa Di (May I have this Dance?) by the Mustafa Kamel theatre club, written by Samih Osman and directed by Mohamed El-Zeini, was a poetic piece, featuring, in a highly metaphoric style, a number of frustrated love stories and thwarted dreams, projected in the form of overlapping, brief sketches in which the actors constantly switched characters and roles, alternately playing the oppressed and oppressors. The performance won second awards for Best Performance and Direction, first award for Best Playwright, a joint award for second Best Actresss24 , shared by Boussi El-Hawwari and Aya Noor, and another for second Best Actor for Ahmed Askar. Sexual frustration and patriarchal oppression surfaced again in the Alexandrian Al-Tazawuq theatre club's Wahid+Wahid=Wahid (One + One = One), also written by Samih Osman and directed by Salwa Ahmed, the only woman director to make it to the final competition. Structurally a monodrama about a split female character, one side of which craves liberation and fulfillment while the other is crippled by a conservative, traditional upbringing , it was performed by the director herself with the help of another actress, Sarah El-Booni, against a simple background of crisscross ropes on which the bits and pieces of needed costumes were draped. Ahmed and El-Booni deservedly shared the first Best Actress Award. Also from Alexandria, this time from El-Anfoushi theatre club, came El-Ishara Lunha Eih? (What Colour is the Traffic Light?), by Ali Osman, directed by Ibrahim Hassan. Dressed in white and encased in a box-like structure of ropes like flies trapped in a spider's web, the actors tried to encompass in the space of less than an hour all the problems that face young people in Egypt today. The scope the author tried to cover defeated him, diluting most of the issues he tried to tackle and leaving the audience wondering what the whole performance was about. Orchestrating the action throughout while standing outside the web of ropes was a young violinist in whiteface who, though looking wistfully romantic, was supposed to be taken for the villain. Sha'r Na'sa (Na'sa's Hair), a mime and movement piece choreographed and directed by Sherif Abbas, was another performance from Mustafa Kamel theatre club in Alexandria. Drawing on the legend of the Egyptian Job and his patient and long suffering wife, Na'saa, who had to sacrifice everything, including her thick locks, to keep him alive when the Lord chose to plague him with a number of horrible diseases, it was poorly imagined in terms of movement and failed to match its subject matter. Yasin El-Sheikh composed the music for both productions and it proved the best element in both, winning him the award for Best Musical Scores in the festival. From another coastal theatrical centre, namely the Port Said theatre club, came Qahwa Modern (A Modern Coffee shop), conceived and directed by Ayman Adel. Here, the effects of Sadat's economic open door policy on this coastal town and the destruction of its old way of life and traditional economy were the focus. A predominantly narrative, lyrical piece, it suffered from extreme verbosity, naïve symbolism and a bulky and shabbily constructed stage set, but was, nevertheless, poignantly nostalgic. It won Sherif Mabrouk a joint award for Best Actor and Mustafa El-Shammouti a joint award for second Best Actor. Contributions from other theatre clubs in Northern Egypt included Afwan Ahdab Notre Dame ( Pace, Hunchback of Notre Dame), from Al-Zaqaziq, written and directed by Mohamed Ali. Here, the story of the famous hunchback and his beloved Esmeralda is processed through the form of a court-room drama in which the hunchback is tried for the murder of Esmeralda and used as a vehicle for denouncing the alliance of corrupt political power with a corrupt clergy. As the trial proceeded and the witnesses were questioned, different versions of what happened were played out before the seated judge as well as three actors dressed and made up to represent statues of a crucified Jesus flanked by two human angels. The human statues reacted to the proceedings in a telling way by minimal changes in gesture and posture, and when finally the collusion of the prosecutor with the real criminal, a powerful military figure, is revealed, the hunchback and Jesus exchange places while the clergy and military stand around laughing triumphantly. Sadly, and quite unfairly, Afwan Ahdab Notre Dame went home without any prizes. Another theatre club from Al-Zaqaziq treated us to a new production of Mustafa Mahmoud's Unshudat Al-Dam (Song of Blood) -- an anti-war piece set in Al-Alamein, in the western desert of Egypt, among the tombs of the victims of the famous battle that took place there during World War II. The play was adapted and directed by Karam Metawe' in the early 1990s and featured veteran comedian Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra, as the demented guard of the cemetery, and film star Yehia El-Fakharani as the sophisticated, urbane visitor. Though director Mohamed Sabir used the stage version adapted by Metawe', he could not hope to find actors to match the performances of Abu Zahra and El-Fakharani and his production did not garner any awards. Al-Batanoon theatre club was luckier. Its colourful version of Shakespeare's King Lear, adapted and directed by Mustafa Murad and performed as a circus act cum puppet show by clowns in motley under the direction of a circus master cum puppeteer, won its stage-designer, Abdel-Rahman El-Gammal, the second award for Best Scenography. But the luckiest of all productions from Egypt's northern provinces was Ghazl Al-Mehalla theatre club's Arabic version of Samak 'Aseer Al-Hadm (Indigestible Fish), a historical/political allegory written in exile by Guatemalan playwright and political activist Manuel Galich Lopez in the early 1960s, here adapted and directed by Khalid Abdel Salam. Though set in the Roman Republic and constructed like a typical Roman comedy, complete with clever slaves and mistaken identity, it comes across as a barbed satire on the contemporary relationship of business and the military. In the introduction to the play Galich says: " El pescado indigesto does not pretend to interpret Roman history. But it seemed unavoidable to place the play's action in Rome during the first century B.C. because that was when the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus wrote his ruthless satires of Caesar. Nor was it of interest to me in El pescado indigesto to weigh whether the vices the poet and other contemporaries attributed to the great general were true or not. The truth is that Catullus, having unleashed his poisonous rancour against Caesar, the causes of which aren't relevant here, has left us, without meaning to, one of the most severe axioms, a symbol valid for all time" (as quoted in E. J. Westlake's Our Land is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemela, Theater in the Americas series,, Southern Illinois University Press , 2005, p.45). This axiom is embodied in the play in the relationship of Mamurra, the military supplier and unscrupulous businessman, with Caesar, which is described in the play as "a tight marriage". Khalid Abdel Salam's adaptation, though it severely abridged the play, preserved its virulent attack on foreign capitalists and the dictatorial regimes that profit from foreign investment, at the same time strongly highlighting the regime's manipulation of the mass media to delude the people and serve its own interests. Besides its topical relevance, this version of Galich's play had the added virtues of being decently designed, nimbly directed and competently performed. It came as no surprise that it scooped the top awards for Best Performance and Best Director, plus a joint first award for Best Actor (that went to Sayed El-Degheidi) and the second award for Best Musical Score ( byIbrahim El-Tantawi). Another ambitious project from Northern Egypt based on a foreign play was Al-Mansoura theatre club's simplified version of Brecht's last, unfinished play, Torandot, or the Whitewashers' Congress, adapted and directed by Ahmed El-Disouqi. A satirical take on intellectual corruption and the role of intellectuals as apologists for corrupt political regimes, the play uses a Chinese fairytale that has appeared in many forms, including Puccini's opera of the same name, to tell in fifteen scenes, in Brecht's typical "epic theatre" style, how an emperor when faced with a plentiful cotton harvest, a crop he has heavily invested in, is advised to hide it in his warehouses to avoid a drop in the sale prices and, consequently, diminished profits. When the people complain and ask where all the cotton has gone, the emperor asks a body of sophist-like intellectuals in his service, here called the Telius (a corruption of the word 'intellectual' coined by Brecht after attending the 1935 congress for the defence of freedom to describe the leftwing thinkers who sat around debating while Hitler brutally consolidated his hold on power) to supply a convincing answer. The prize offered for the best answer is the hand of the pretty but daft Princess Turandot, and it is eventually won by a local gangster called Gogher Gogh who wants to become a Teliu because he feels "destined for public service" and thinks that marrying into the Imperial Family would be a good career move for a gangster. Perhaps because it was never finished, the play is a bit confusing. As Fiona Mountford remarked in The Evening Standard on 16 September, 2008, "the piece rambles off on typically Brechtian tangents, before bewilderingly abandoning its original set-up almost entirely for an Arturo Ui-like rerun of gun-toting Chicago gangsters." This explains, perhaps, El-Disouqi's severe abridgement and extreme simplification of the original play in his production in order to emphasize its attack of capitalism and absolute rulers and the degradation of ideas and opinions into marketable commodities sold in the market place. It, however, does not excuse his transformation and apotheosis of the play's Hitler-figure, Gogher Gogh, into a romantic lover, real sage, a national hero and the people's saviour, nor does it justify the new end in which the emperor decides to leave his palace and mingle with his people. Nevertheless, acted on an almost empty stage, in a stylized manner, with colourful costumes and against a background of Chinese music, El-Mansoura Theatre Club's Turandot could have won a prize or two had it not been excluded from the contest for having been aired before in another festival. As usual in such events, Upper Egypt was thinly represented by only two productions. Sohag's theatre club participated with Marwa Farouq's Kharbasha (Scratches), directed by Mustafa Ibrahim El-Sayed, about a group of passengers in a train of which the driver has gone berserk. A political satire on the current regime's loss of purpose and direction, it reworks the same theme treated by Saad El-Din Wahba in his 1960s' Sikket El-Salama (The Road to Safety) and also draws on Salah Abdel-Saboor's 1960s' poetic, absurdist political satire Musafir Leil (Night Traveller). Kharbasha won its authoress the second award for Best Playwright. Also from Upper Egypt, this time from Aswan, came Maa' wa Dimaa' (Blood and Water), by Samer Anwar, directed by Ahmed Mohamed Hassan. An expressionistic piece with minimal dialogue and lots of pipes alternately shooting blood and water, it won its stage designer, Khalid Atallah, the top prize for Best Scenography. Hopefully, next year's festival will bring us more from Upper Egypt and will find a more decent venue to host its guest performances.
