Who said Arabs spoke one language, asks Nehad Selaiha at the first Arab Theatre festival launched in Cairo on 6 May The organizers can say what they like, but the festival which opened at the Opera House on 6 May is by no means the first Arab theatre Festival, as it was billed and publicized. I can remember at least two previous Arab theatre festivals organized by the Egyptian ministry of culture and held in Cairo in the 1990s, not to mention the annual festival held (with a subsidy from the ministry of culture) by the Egyptian Society for Theatre Amateurs (ESTA) which in the past few years has taken to calling and advertising itself as 'the Arab theatre festival' though it consists mainly of performances by Egyptian amateur groups with only a tiny sprinkling of small and modest guest shows from one or two Arab countries plus one or two Arab theatre personalities whom the Society invites to honour at the opening ceremony. The theatrical event, which started on the 6th and ended on the 10th of this month, should have been called, in the interest of accuracy, the first Biennial Theatre Festival of the Arab Theatre Organization. Founded last year at the initiative of and with generous funds from the ruler of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (whose full title reads His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al-Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah), this Hay'a, or organisation, has its headquarters in Cairo and branches in a number of other Arab capitals. It has a list of impressive names on its board and at its head is Ashraf Zaki who is also the head of the Egyptian state theatre organisation, a member of the academic staff at the theatre institute in the Academy of Arts, the chairman of the Egyptian Union of Theatre Professionals and the chairman of the Arab Artists Union. Too many jobs for one man, many would say, but Zaki seems to cope, dexterously juggling all the eggs without dropping any so far. The story behind this Arab Theatre Organization goes back to the late 1990s when Al-Qasimi suddenly, in an unprecedented move, took it into his head to write for the theatre and commissioned the best Arab directors around to stage his plays. It was the first time ever that an Arab ruler decided to take up playwriting and many were puzzled. But then Al-Qasimi is no ordinary Arab ruler; after studying agronomy at the faculty of agriculture at Cairo University, graduating in 1971, he turned his attention first to history, obtaining a doctorate in the history of the Gulf from the university of Exeter in 1985, then to the political geography of the Gulf, which he researched at the university of Durham, also in the UK, acquiring a second doctorate in 1999. Besides authoring several books on historical and political topics, he also wrote two novels -- Al-Shaykh Al-Abyad (The White Sheikh) and Al-Amir Al-Tha'er (The Rebel Prince) -- and showed himself an enthusiastic lover and patron of culture and the arts, making generous personal endowments to the Historical Society and the Writers' Union in Egypt, contributing millions of pounds sterling towards the renovation and refurbishing of the central library of the University of Exeter as well as establishing and funding a Centre for Gulf Studies there, supporting artists and intellectuals in his home base out of his own pocket and building at his personal expense a wildlife reserve there for endangered species. History was definitely on Al-Qasimi's mind when he turned his hand to drama in 1998; his aim, as one can gather from the 6 plays he has written so far, was to use the more popular medium of theatre to help ordinary Arabs, particularly the illiterate among them, to know their history and learn its lessons by drawing parallels between past and present conflicts, victories and defeats. All the plays -- Awdat Hulako (The Return of Hulegu), Al-Qadiyya (The Issue), and Al-Waqi': Sura Tibq Al-Asl (Reality, a Carbon Copy), successively staged in Sharjah by Iraqi director Qasim Mohamed in 1999, 2000, and 2001, Alexander the Great (published in 2006 and staged in 2007 by Egyptian director Ahmed Abdel-Halim also in Sharjah), Al-Namroud (Nimrod) (published in 2008, staged the same year by Tunisian director Al-Munsif Al-Souissi and performed in Sharjah and Damascus) and, finally, Samson The Mighty, published in 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the loss of Palestine ( Al-Nakba ) and staged by Ahmed Abdel-Halim first in Sharjah, then in Cairo at the opening of the first festival of the Arab Theatre Organization on the 6th of this month -- all 6 plays are simple (not to say simplistic), straightforward, didactic allegories with one-dimensional characters and a clear, direct message. As such, they make no claim to dramatic complexity or dialectical, in-depth analysis. Indeed, each text, though it is divided into 3 or 5 acts in the classical manner, is extremely short, made up of a number of brief, chronologically ordered scenes marked by entrances and exits. In a charitable mood, one could describe them as sketchy outlines with some dialogue for spectacular historical pageants. Indeed, the 3 productions I watched, including Samson, were sumptuously and expensively staged, with elaborate sets, armies of extras, colourful costumes and plenty of visual and sound effects. But though one may not take Al-Qasimi seriously as a dramatist, one cannot but admire his keenness to promote theatre in the Arab world and his boundless generosity in this respect. I don't know how much money he has poured into this Arab theatre organisation, but this first festival must have cost a fortune. Apart from the extravagant opening ceremony (which struck me as too garish, especially that huge stand, covered with a red carpet and lined with musicians, which the guests had to mount and cross in order to reach the entrance of the main hall of the Opera where the ceremony took place) and the equally costly dinner held at the Manesterly palace afterwards, the festival brought 12 performances to Cairo from 11 Arab countries -- the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria -- paying the air fare of their casts and technical crews, as well as that of a horde of Arab critics, writers, directors, scholars and journalists, and hosting the lot at a posh hotel for the duration of the event. Now the question is: was it worth it? Of the 12 Arab performances in the festival, I missed Yemen's The King and Vengeance and Sudan's Please, Come Accompanied by Adults ; Syria's Two Immigrants I had already seen last year in Damascus, and though it is a gripping and excellently performed psychological study of the motives that drive two Syrian males of different classes and cultural backgrounds to leave home and country, I reluctantly gave it a miss. Of the nine I caught, only Palestine's Ana Al-Quds (I am Jerusalem), by Ashtar Theatre in Jerusalem, could be described as a memorable theatrical experience, challenging, thought-provoking and aesthetically absorbing. A monodrama for one woman assisted by two dancers, it reviewed the turbulent history of that ancient city and the attempts of all the nations that passed through it to erode its identity, destroy its will and claim it as their own. Iman Aoun who personified the city, giving it a woman's voice, thought up the idea of the show which Nasser Omar then researched and gave dramatic shape, producing a highly provocative, iconoclastic text which he himself sensitively directed with the help of Randi Abdin's eloquent choreography, Salam Kanaan's simple and versatile set, Philippe Andrieux's inspired lighting design and Hanna Hassan's stark costumes. As Jerusalem, recounting and questioning her painful history over more than 5000 years and enacting her conflicts with her historical male oppressors and violators, Iman Aoun acted with passion and deep conviction and was simply mesmerizing. The rest of the shows were trite, pretentious, half- baked, too simplistic, or downright derivative, or all five things together. Though some of them barely lasted an hour, they seemed to drag on, rambling tiresomely and getting more boring by the minute. More exciting and dramatic were some the critical discussions and assessments which followed the performances. Arabs are notoriously over sensitive to criticism when it comes from fellow Arabs. This is why the festival organizers sagaciously avoided prizes. But they had to keep in the discussions to give the festival a semblance of intellectual and artistic seriousness and also because a lot of Arab artists pretend to welcome criticism, insisting that they to learn and benefit from it. In fact, the only thing they welcome on such occasions is praise and the only thing they want to hear is how great and wonderful they are. In many of the discussions, as reported in the daily festival bulletin, the panels of critics leading them (always Egyptian, the other Arab critics having wisely kept away) invariably tried to soften their criticism, often restricting themselves to general, vague remarks, or to positive comments, seeing good things where none existed. On the few occasions when this tight-rope-walking critical policy was not maintained, the result was usually an ugly row. In the discussion that followed the Sudanese Please, Come Accompanied by Adults, Shams Eddin Yusef, the director of the Sudanese national theatre, flew into a rage at the unusually open unfavourable comments of one member of the paned, aggressively accusing him of total ignorance, not only of the Sudanese theatre, but also of the proper way to go about criticizing plays. The critic responded with a counter offensive and the two parties nearly came to blows. A similar ugly scene broke up the discussion of the Tunisian Cinema but for a different reason. Now Arabs, and especially Tunisians, generally resent the fact that while Egyptian colloquial Arabic is understood everywhere in the Arab world, thanks to the popularity of Egyptian movies and television drama, very few Egyptians understand the local versions of Arabic spoken in many Arab countries. Unwittingly, the Egyptian critics saddled with discussing the Tunisian Cinema touched this sore point, declaring at the outset that they could not understand the Tunisian dialect and, therefore, could not make head or tail of the play, then asking the director to explain what it was all about. Naturally, the Tunisian director was deeply offended, and said so without much ceremony. He accused the Egyptian critics and public of being smug and lazy and acting superiour, not taking the trouble to learn how other Arabs speak. "If Tunisian critics can understand Egyptian Arabic, why can't Egyptian critics understand Tunisian Arabic?" He asked in high dudgeon. When one of the critics suggested that in future editions of the festival all performances should be in classical Arabic to make them accessible to all Arabs and that he would propose this to the head of the festival, this seemed like the last straw and the Tunisians nearly hit the roof. But Cinema was not the only show that critics and audiences found hard to follow. The same complaint was made about the above-mentioned Sudanese show, as well as Algeria's The Last Train and Bahrain's Aisha -- that is, about all the shows that were performed in the local dialects of their countries, barring those from Syria and Lebanon. Ironically, the problem of language, of Arabs understanding each other, cropped up also in the festival's one-day symposium on the future of Arab theatre, held on the morning following the opening. In a paper entitled "In Search of An Arabic Theatrical Text", Syrian writer Walid Ekhlasi admitted that many Arabs do not know the dialects of other Arab countries and suggested, by way of a solution to this problem, that "all theatre plays should be written in classical Arabic so that they can be easily translated into the more than 5,000 languages spoken in the Arab world. Each director can then present them in his own dialect according to his social environment." Does this mean that Arabic has to be translated into other languages so that Arabs can understand it? Rashid Mustafa Bekheit addressed the same question in his paper on "Theatre and Multiculturalism in Sudan", pointing out that in Sudan, though Arabic is the official language, "there are more than 50 ethnic groups divided into 570 tribal groups who speak more than 114 different languages in their daily life". If you cannot speak of a Sudanese theatre that speaks the same language, how can you begin to speak about an Arab theatre? And if Arabs do not use the same language in their daily speech, how can one believe Walid Ikhlasi's suggestion that Arabic theatre, meaning plays written in classical Arabic, could perhaps play a role in building a unified national Arab culture. I once wrote that whereas one "can credibly speak of an Arab world -- meaning a group of geographically neighbouring, multi-ethnic, predominantly Muslim states where the population in each speaks a local version of classical Arabic, thickly interlaced with words, echoes and rhythms which belong to earlier languages, cultures and historical periods -- for the term Arab culture to make any sense at all, it has to be viewed as a plural entity (Arab cultures rather than culture) and understood as an ongoing, dialogic historical process -- a rich composite of heterogeneous elements, shaped and held together by historical forces and pressures and constantly redefined by its internal tensions and relations to other cultural conglomerates -- East, West, North and South. Without recognizing this diversity and initiating an inter-Arab dialogue which stresses the differences between the various regions and societies as much as the similarities, it would be difficult to establish an authentic dialogue with other cultures. Indeed, within each Arab society there are diverse cultural groupings or subcultures, which the dominant, official culture needs to acknowledge, engage in dialogue and accommodate. For if members of the same family cannot talk to each other and accept their difference, how can they hope to communicate with their next-door neighbours or those farther a field?" (See 'Back on the Silk Road' , Al-Ahram Weekly, 28 October 2004, Issue 714.) This passage was much in my mind during the festival and I think that what I said about Arab culture applies to the language we call Arabic as well. Rather than one 'Arabic language', we should accept that we speak many ' Arabic languages '.
