Nehad Selaiha rushes about town in pursuit of the new After a thin trickle in February, I was caught in a veritable downpour of fringe performances last week. On 20 March, Huda wasfi, the artistic director of Al-Hanager, opened the Centre's second independent theatre season which will run until 22 June, offering 10 new productions, totalling 80 performances, with only a two-day break separating one work from the next (see schedule below). Judging by the titles, it is going to be quite a feast with lots of artistic variety, plenty of topical relevance and a pronounced political accent. Indeed, the fact that this second season, unlike the first one which was hosted at Rawabet last year, will take place at Al-Hanager's own headquarters in defiance of officialdom and its suspicious and quite unwarranted insistence on keeping it closed, is in itself a significant political act of protest and has drawn to the opening hordes of angry young artists and sympathetic supporters. Significantly, the Theatre Atelier's production which launched the season and ended on 27 March carried the cautionary, emblematic title, Laqad Awshaka Raseedokom 'ala el-Nafad (Your Credit is About to Run Out), and seemed to set the tone of the whole event at the very start. Featuring the wedding of a reluctant young couple in an expensive hotel, with a live band in attendance, it begins by sardonically surveying the attitudes of the couple's in-laws and friends towards the sacred bond, revealing an innate fear and deep misunderstanding, or ignorance of sex and a paradoxical fascination/ revulsion feeling about it, then introduces a power failure which plunges the ceremony and the rest of the action in darkness till near the end. In the darkness, as the characters stumble around, blindly knocking into each other, or huddle in small, whispering groups, with only torches lighting their faces, old memories float up and scenes from the past occupy the stage. In those scenes, the traditional way of bringing up children and educating them according to the dictates of the cultural heritage is farcically exposed as the root cause of the sense of impotence, frustration, alienation and oppression experienced by young people today. Brought up on hypocrisy, pretence and fear, coerced into obeying without questioning and repeating by rote what they do not understand, and taught to fear and despise the body and regard it as the seat of sin, they grow up into schizophrenic, emotionally immature and thoroughly insecure adults, incapable of forming healthy relationships with the other sex or building a life of their own away from their parents. The mixture of wry irony, saucy laughter and iconoclastic satire reaches a climax when the lights come up again on the wedding scene and we see the couple, after the guests have departed, sitting separately -- 'He' watching a sex movie on the net with some friends, and 'She' flirting coquettishly with the sexy host of a phone-in midnight radio show. Based on the improvisations of the actors, with the final script collaboratively put together by dramaturge Rasha Abdel Mon'im and director Mohamed Abdel-Khaliq, Your Credit is About to Run Out draws heavily on the conventions and routines of popular comedy and frequently resorts to gags, slanging matches and slapstick farce. But though overwhelmingly vivacious, with most of the actors doubling as adults and kids or teenagers and the part of the bridegroom split among three actors, and despite its taut conception and tight temporal framework, its sizzling subject and spicy dialogue, Your Credit tended to ramble at times and seemed in need of compression and a better orchestration in the management of the dialogue. Such faults are not unusual in collectively-built, improvisation-based shows; the temptation to adlib on the spot is irresistible and often throws off the other actors, halting the rhythmic flow of the dialogue. What I could not understand, however, was the director's insistence on using those gaily covered foam block which the actors kept piling up in different formations between scenes to suggest different locations. As décor, they were ridiculous, extremely cumbersome and a waste of effort and time. Since he had a small budget and could not afford proper sets, he should have done without them. Indeed, in this kind of show no sets are needed and the few props and boxes he used as seats would have been quite adequate by themselves. In any case, Your Credit gave this important event a promising start and leads one to look forward to the next offerings. Within two days of the opening of Al-Hanager's second independent theatre season, two further theatrical events were launched on the fringe: El-Sawy Centre's 4th 3-day monodrama festival, at Al-Saqia in Zamalek, and the United Drama Groups 4th 6-day 'Grain of Wheat' theatre festival at the Franciscan Fathers' Nile Hall downtown. Since the two events opened at exactly the same hour on 22nd March, I decided to sacrifice the first, ceremonial part of the opening of the Drama Groups festival, which I knew would be taken up with honouring playwright Lenin El-Ramli and veteran actress Samiha Ayoub, and use that time to catch the first two of the four monodramas scheduled at Al-Saqia that night. Amgad Imam's Risalah min al-Qalb (Message from the Heart), performed by Mohamed Al-Haddad, was about a hen-pecked husband who seeks relief from marital oppression by writing novels featuring strong, dominant males and meek submissive females; when informed over the phone that his wife has had an accident and would he please come and pick up the body, he experiences a momentary sense of release but soon discovers that he has become mentally his wife's captive prisoner and though she is dead, he cannot leave his cell unless she herself lets him out. Soad El-Qadi's Teatro followed, using clowning and a shadow play to build a series of satirical scenes about the hardships and indignities suffered by the ordinary Egyptian citizen on a daily basis. Before El-Qadi stepped out to take her bows I was already in a taxi haring off to the Nile Hall to watch the Angels Team's production of Alfred Farag's one-act play Al-Gharib (The Stranger) which I knew would be the first performance in the Drama Groups festival. I was glad I did this. I wouldn't have missed The Stranger for anything. I had not read the play before and watched with fascination the realistic situation it features gradually acquire an expressionistic dimension and a psychological twist and develop into a complex and poignant theatrical metaphor for loneliness and the mental agony it causes. Farag was truly a master craftsman: the man we see in the first scene trying to make a telephone call with the help of a directory and repeatedly getting the wrong number seems quite at home until suddenly a woman walks through the front door and screams, identifying him as an intruder. He, however, succeeds in pacifying and reassuring her, telling her that he means no harm and only wants to wait there until dark then would leave in peace. Charmed by his courtesy and gentleness, and secretly glad of the company, she discards the idea of calling the police and instead offers him coffee. This thrilling beginning triggers a lot of questions on the part of the woman, but the stranger adamantly refuses to answer them, telling her the answers would cause her a great deal of worry and anxiety and that she had better imagine the answers that would comfort her. This advice triggers in turn a volley of questions, this time directed by the stranger at the woman and her negative answers to all of them reveal her painful loneliness which has lately caused her to suffer from hallucinations. At this point we begin to understand her panic at the idea of his sudden disappearance and her insistence that he keeps on talking to her while she prepares coffee in the kitchen offstage. Like her, we begin to wonder whether this stranger is real or one of her hallucinations; then suddenly, in a masterful stroke, Farag springs upon us the fact that the old friend whose number the stranger was desperately looking for in the directory has the same name as the woman. From then on the play moves on two levels: the illusory, quasi-realistic and the psychological/metaphoric, recreating for us quite vividly the reality of of loneliness, its attendant anxiety and the pain of frustrated longings. In the original text, which I read later, the play ends with a police inspector storming into the flat, accompanied by two male nurses, to arrest the stranger as an escaped lunatic who has the same name as the woman herself. The placard on the door which carries her name, which is also his, led them to him, the inspector tells her. In the Angels Team's production, however, this convenient and realistically reassuring end was discarded in the interest of sustaining the psychological/metaphoric level. Without sacrificing the hint coached in the inspector's words that the stranger could possibly be the woman's doppelganger, working it into the visual texture of the performance in the form of a mime and dance sequence, this production ends with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of the stranger and with the woman slumped pathetically on the floor, in the dark, hysterically calling her psychiatrist for help, then gazing upwards in utter dejection. This intriguing two-hander was sensitively directed by Michel Maher, the founder of the Angels Team, with a deceptively cheerful realistic set by Joseph Neseem and effective incidental music by Mario Medhat. The burden of dramatic credibility, however, lay squarely on the shoulders of Martine Ishaq, as the lonely working woman, and Murad Kamel, as the stranger and later her doppelganger. The two formed a wonderful, beguiling duet and managed the tricky transition between the two levels of the text with enviable dexterity, maintaining the elements of mystery and suspense for as long as possible. The only thing that marred this beautiful performance was the sentimental, musical finale the director foisted on it, stretching it beyond its natural end. Rather than leave us with the image of the woman's face framed in a halo of light while turned upward in a silent plea for help, he had Martine, accompanied by music, physically repeat all her movements and gestures during the play in quick succession, giving us a visual run through of the play in mime as if to tell us that this was what really happened, that all the time she had been talking to her self and that the stranger was a figment of her imagination. Not only was this explanatory coda totally unnecessary and offensively redundant, seeming like an insult to the audience's intelligence, it also seriously weakened the impact of the final scene. Michel Maher would do well to remove it. On 23 March I was back at Al-Saqia for more monodramas, and of the 14 performances I watched over the three days of the festival, the best were Samaa Ibrahim's Ana (I am) Carmen, George Fawzi's Hatmoot Liwahdak (You Will Die Alone), Mohamed Yusri's adaptation of Leila Abdel-Basit's Mawwal Al-Ghorba, (Ballad of the Homesick), directed by Ramadan Khatir and performed by Maher Zaki, Wisam Al-Medani's Al-Ragul Al- 'Azraa' (Virgin Man) and Ahmed Abdel-Fattah's Sa'id Mistika (the name of the hero). In Ana Carmen, a poor and illiterate cleaning woman at a theatre is seen sweeping and washing the stage after a performance of Bizet's Carmen and airing her grievances, longings and frustrations while she works. Her story soon gets entwined with that of Bizet's heroine who has captured her imagination and with whom she identifies. Bizet's music is cleverly worked into the texture of the performance and some arias are actually rephrased in Arabic and joyously and defiantly sung by the aged, bedraggled cleaner. At such moments, when she removes her white coat and headscarf and whirls round in ecstasy, waving colourful shawls, she seems as if transformed by magic and turns into a wild and beautiful woman not unlike Carmen. The spell only lasts a few minutes and then she is back to reality and drudgery. By the end of the show we vividly feel that though very different in looks and a many other respects, Bizet's wild Carmen and Samaa's poor, pathetic creature have something deep in common: the same appetite for life, the same rebellious spirit, the same defiant longing for freedom. Poignant as the cleaner's monologue is, it is often witty and humorous and the visual contrast between the drawing of Carmen projected as a huge slide at the back throughout and the actual woman on stage was a constant source of amused laughter. Ana Carmen was a little gem of a show, absorbing, fascinating, hilarious and deeply moving -- a show impossible to forget. Intertextuality, this time with Hamlet, and squeezing comedy out of the bleakest of situations were also behind the success of George Fawzi's You Will Die Alone. Alienated, frustrated, betrayed and driven to madness by society, Fawzi's hero, like Hamlet, is weary of life and longs for death, knowing that as he lived in loneliness, he will also die alone. Though mad, there is method in his madness, and rather than talk to himself, he addresses his bleak monologue to a skull which he holds in his hand. By manipulating the skull as a glove- puppet, making it nod in sorrow or enthusiastic approval, or turn away in disgust, Fawzi infused a lot of comedy and black humour into his performance, undercutting the sense of doom and gloom and sending ripples of laughter across the auditorium. Humour also saved the emotional integrity of the Ballad of the Homesick -- a monologue by a destitute Egyptian peasant who, having lost all his savings, is stranded in Iraq where he went to make some money when life became unbearable at home and who is finally dragged into a war in which he gets killed. Here, however, the humour was mostly the work of the director who embroidered the sad monologue with ironical physical postures and movement patterns, making the actor at one point lie on his back, raising his legs to form number 7 and holding his hoe upside down in his right hand to form number 6, so that you suddenly find 67, the year of Egypt's disastrous defeat in the 6-day war boldly written on stage. Sa'id Mistika and Virgin Man, and indeed most of the monodramas in this edition, could have done with a dose of humour to balance the pathos and guard against sentimental wallowing. Without exception, all the shows harped on the same depressing themes: loneliness, frustration, fear, betrayal, alienation, impotence, oppression, etc., and most ended with the hero dying, getting killed or committing suicide either by shooting or, more often, hanging himself. Indeed, the latter method seemed quite a favourite in this festival with the noose featuring in as many as 8 shows, descending from the flies at the end like a gruesome deus ex machina to put the hero out of his misery. When it confronted us yet again on the 3rd and last day, in Husam Qandil's Signing in, Signing out -- a lugubrious piece featuring a morgue with corpses and a mad, blood-sucking doctor/ dictator in a blood stained white coat, one began to wonder if the noose wasn't the real emblem of the festival and should have, therefore, graced its poster. The 2nd Independent Theatre Season at Al-Hanager: 20-27/3: Atelier al-Masrah: Laqad Awshaka Raseedokom 'ala...(Your Credit is About to Run Out). 30/3-7/4: La Musica: Nisaa' fi Hayatihi (Women in His Life). 10-17/4: Al-Misaharati: Viva Mama. 20-23/4: Kwalees Al-Masrah: Al-Guthath allati Tafat Fawq al-Mutawase (Bodies that Floated on the Mediterranean). 26/4-3/5: Gam'iyat Al-Dirasat: 'A'ilat Tawfiq (Tawfiq's Family). 6-13/5: Al-Doo': Qa'id walla Mashi (Are You Staying or Going?). 16-23/5: Shousha: Ionesco's Al-Mughania Al-Salaa' ( La Cantatrice Chauve ). 26/5-2/6: Al-Hurriyah: Mihatet Al-Autobees (Bus Stop). 5-12/6: Al-Ghagar: Hadatha ( It Happened), an adaptation of Brian Friel's Freedom of the City. 15-22/6: Al-Makhbar: Al-Garaad (Locusts).
