Nehad Selaiha describes other favourite works at the Euro-Mediterranean Forum for Independent theatre which ended last week Last week I talked extensively about Iphigenia in Aulis by the Polish Gardzienice company which I thought was the star performance in this year's Euro-Mediterranean Forum for Independent theatre at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. I also applauded L-Interdett Taht is-Sodda (Interdiction under the Bed ) by Maltese writer Clare Azzopardi, one of the 6 plays, all by women, which the Forum commissioned translations of and published this year. This week, I would like to tell you about a guaranteed way to remove stains, a chocolate fountain, two clowns and a naked dancer, all of which are treasures that I stumbled upon in this edition of the Forum and which particularly intrigued and delighted me. Taking her inspiration from all those TV commercials about detergents where only women appear, and not ever a man, Rasha Abdel-Mo'em, a young and talented Egyptian playwrigh, who two years ago won the award for best rising dramatist at the Egyptian National Theatre Festival, decided to take that humble, mundane and quite familiar, not to say extremely tedious domestic chore which patriarchy ordained that women should be exclusively saddled with, namely, the removal of stains, obstinate or otherwise, and weave a play around it. In The Guaranteed Way to Remove Stains, a monologue for one actress, divided by blackouts into 10 short scenes, accompanied by a few domestic actions and some costume changes, and punctuated by the chimes of a wall clock and the ringing of a telephone and a doorbell off stage, this chore is transformed into a sardonically gruesome theatrical metaphor for a woman's efforts to remove the mental and moral stains that blot her life. The play begins with a woman in her mid-thirties, clad in black, sitting at a wooden table in her kitchen or bathroom (the stage directions do not specify which), with a bunch of dresses behind her, listening to a recorded recipe for removing stains which she promptly puts into action, filling a bath tub next to her with boiling water, pouring into it a whole bag of caustic soda and stirring it with a big wooden ladle. In the second scene, she stops the recorder, changes the tape and presses the record button; and as she begins to speak, real stains are transformed into metaphorical ones and her simple actions begin to acquire a sinister meaning. Her first words tell the audience (in Hala Kamal's translation) that "There are lots of people whose presence in our lives is not more than a stain; a big, dry stain ... that does not respond to repeated washing ... like a big stain of blood which has dried and people then poured mango juice and hibiscus tea on top of it, and then splotched it with rotten food cooked with mutton fat, and then a mule came by and shitted on it," and "it remained exposed to the air for years until the cloth underneath was itself worn out and there was nothing left but the stain itself." When at the end of the scene a 'he' is bitterly mentioned as having soiled her life, we begin to smell a rat and wonder what she is cooking. As the monologue proceeds, telling us more and more about the woman -- her trauma at seeing the first stain of menstrual blood on her school uniform and subsequent feelings of fear and disgust, her anxiety at seeing the red mark of losing her virginity when she first slept with her lover, her lover's balking at the idea of marriage and his leaving her for another woman and blaming it on her -- we realize that she is expecting the lover she has described as a selfish, perfidious, lier. But though Rasha gives us some clues as to what the woman is planning, we never actually expect a real murder. The fact that the woman keeps wearing one dress after another then dropping them into the caustic liquid somehow fools us and lulls our suspicions. It is not until scene 6 that we discover that the innocent looking atomizer that has been standing on the table all the time actually contains a stun spray, and not until scene 7, when she rushes to answer the door, carrying the spray with her, and comes back dragging the body of a man, that we realize what the play has been building up to and what the woman has done. Scene 7 comes in two versions which the writer allows the director to choose between: in the first, somewhat lurid version, the woman undresses her unconscious lover, makes love to him, then dumps him into the tub to melt after suffocating him with a pillow; in the second, she simply stands staring at the tub and hugging his clothes in a way that suggests she has already killed him and disposed of the corpse. The final 3 scenes in which the woman sits morbidly watching the body dissolving and regretting she has not kept one bone as a memento, discovers a wedding dress inside the gift box her lover had brought along and wears it without a hint of remorse, robustly announcing at the end that now he has 'evaporated', she bears him no grudge and feels she is 'back, pure and chaste' while he has been purged -- these 3 scenes suffer from overwriting and can be whittled down and compressed into one. Indeed, unless the reader regards the heroine as a bit unhinged, s/he might find it difficult to swallow the last four scenes and may suspect, with good reason, that in them the writer's strong personal views have got the better of dramatic judgement. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that though story of a woman killing her lover for taking her virginity then jilting her is a bit old- fashioned and melodramatic, Rasha Abdel-Mo'em has tried to project it from a fresh point of view and managed at moments to lace her heroine's monologue with a caustic kind of humour. Moreover, her clever use of a domestic chore as a metaphor and her ability to keep the reader in suspense for most of the play augur well for her future as a dramatist. Given the chance, I would have told Rasha's heroine that a better recipe to remove the stains on her soul was to read Aladdin et le Chocolat by French writer and actress Marion Adele. In this charming children's play, which Menha El-Batrawi beautifully rendered into colloquial Arabic, calling the genie of the lamp 'Afrakoush' after similar genies in Arabic fairytales, the reader is transported to Baghdad -- but not present day Baghdad, or the one in The Arabian Nights, but a curious, delightfully imagined mixture of both. In this new Baghdad, Sheherezade, though the Sultan's daughter, disguises herself as a state courier out of boredom and gads about the city on her magic carpet without a driving license, occasionally colliding with other, more technologically sophisticated models of the same vehicle and quarrelling with their owners. Far from behaving as a princess, she befriends Aladdin, a humble confectioner who is sacked from the palace kitchens for refusing to make plain, black chocolate and insisting on cooking it the way he and Sheherezade like it, with milk, almonds, raisins, grated orange peel and a touch of hot red pepper. When the chocolate cake prepared for the Sultan's birthday melts in the sun (Adele does not provide her Baghdad with fridges) and the Sultan's bakers (who lapped it all as it dripped) discover that there is no more chocolate left to make another, the palace puts out an announcement that the man who succeeds in securing the needed chocolate for the Sultan's birthday cake would not only marry princess Sheherezade, but would also get 2 free tickets to the Baghdad Star Academy concert. The problem is that the magic chocolate fountain stands inside an enchanted temple deep in the desert, very much like an oil well, and that only a prince/ confectioner could get through the temple gates. Since Aladdin is already a confectioner; all he needs to carry out the mission and marry his beloved Sheherezade is to become a prince -- an easy task which the genie he releases from the lamp could easily accomplish in a second.. However, as in most fairytales, there is an evil magician who has to be defeated before a happy end could be reached; and here, disguised as a prince and calling himself Zarial, the Black Magician first decides to steal the lamp from Aladdin and beat him to the chocolate fountain in order to marry Sheherezade, and when this plan miscarries, he tricks Aladdin, Sheherezade and the genie of the lamp into following him into the desert, and there, he keeps them as hostages inside the enchanted temple, intending to demand the Sultan's throne as a ransom for their freedom. Aladdin's good deeds, however, catch up with him and a serpent, whom he had helped earlier in the play, dressing its wounds, comes to the rescue and frees the prisoners. When they finally capture the Black Magician and bring him before the Sultan, we discover that the reward announced by the palace for the obtaining of chocolate was nothing but a ploy contrived by the Sultan himself, who does not really care for chocolate at all, in order to trip up the Black Magician who is wanted by the police and has for long eluded its under-cover agents who have among their ranks the wife of the genie Afrakoush. A wealth of imagination and comic invention has obviously gone into the making of this play, and it extends from the simple but vivid portrayal of the characters, the paradoxical use of hi-Tec jargon in speaking of object that belong in the world of fantasy, such as magic carpets, genies and lamps -- a verbal strategy that positions the play in an exciting space between fact and fiction, the implicit and constant appeal to the children's intelligence to keep trafficking between the past and present and different worlds and the frequent, well-judged and spontaneous-sounding calls upon them to help the actors in moments of danger, to the hilarious revelation that the serpent who saved Aladdin and his company was in fact Afrakoush's wife, and that she too was the one who aborted the lamp's magical spell and rendered it ineffectual at the right moment by bugging, through the internet, the information hard disk of the central genie computer. But nowhere does the writer's power of invention show itself more stunningly than in recreating chocolate as a metaphor for oil. Liquid chocolate and oil have the same colour and slimy look; and setting the play in Baghdad, and placing the chocolate fountain in the desert gave the play a pronounced political dimension so that it was impossible to read it without having Iraq, its oil wells, the ugly conflicts they have triggered, and the modern black magicians who seek to control them constantly on your mind. Next to spending an hour reading an intelligent and imaginative children's play such as Marion Adele's, and enjoying, in your mind's eye, the company of her delightfully inept and clownish genie and her mouthwatering descriptions of chocolate and ice cream, the next best recipe to remove hard stains from the mind, I could have told Rasha's heroine, was to spend an evening in the company of live clowns of the caliber of Henri Kokko and Lasse Beischer. For me, the delightful evening I spent in the company of the '1 2 3 Schtunk' troupe from Sweden was healing and cathartic, apart from being one of the major highlights of the year's Forum. For 2 and a half hours we watched super clowns Lasse Beischer and Henri Kokko as they muddled their way through Shakespeare's Richard III, subtitled A Day at the Tower. In white face and a variety of costumes, they impersonated all the main characters, acting out the major soliloquies and stormy confrontations in a hilarious fashion and frequently breaking off to address the audience, ask for their support, engage them in repartee, or humorously admonish them for not giving them a good hand, and punctuating their performance with songs to the tune of a guitar while wearing the typical commedia dell'arte masks of Arlecchino and Pantalone during these musical intervals. Such taking offs of Shakespearean plays are not new of course and depend for their success on the performers' comic versatility, power of improvisation and ability to draw out the audience, secure their amused collaboration and keep them enthralled. In this case, the two clowns were superb, alternately grotesque, farcical or hilariously pert and cocky. Their sharp-tongued sallies at Mahmoud Abu Doma, the director of the Forum who was present, were particularly saucy and extremely funny. Like all comic duos, Beischer and Kokko fought all the time, with Beischer always acting as a bully, mocking Kokko and treating him as a dud, and Kokko retaliating by bewitching the audience and getting the bigger applause. These two fantastic comedians and their technician Thomas Paulsson had been to the Forum once before with a parody of Macbeth, and judging by the reception of A Day at the Tower, it won't be the last performance the '1 2 3 Schtunk' brings to Alexandria. The reception of Klepsydra (Hourglass) by the Polish Teatr A PART, was equally exciting but in a totally different key. Inspired by a poem called A Thirty-year Old Woman, by Ryszard Krynicki, a translation of which was handed to the audience at they filed into the Gallery where the performance took place, and of which fragments were recited in Polish by the solo performer, dancer Monika Wachowicz, at the end of the show, Hourglass, a dance and movement poetic piece, featured the suffering, frustration, anger and despair of an abused, betrayed and terribly lonely woman who tells us at the end (in Jack Katanski's English translation): "My annihilation comes true continuously / Since then I seek my friends among the dead only / Inside me / And among the forgotten." Austerely dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black trousers, Monika Wachowicz at first paced round the space in measured steps, occasionally tripping and performing some ground movements in which she bent her body extremely backwards and, supporting her self on one hand placed on the floor, revolved it horizontally, hitting the floor hard as she went round and round in that position with the feminine, high heels she wore so that they became the focus of the exercise. The rest of the performance consisted of an act of gradual striptease in which the black shirt and trousers went first, followed by the miniskirt and revealing top she wore underneath, then by the underwear. Though there was no hint of titillation in the dancer's movements or the music which accompanied them, and though her thin and childish body seemed quite frail and pathetically vulnerable as it was gradually stripped of its protective covering, you could feel the tension building in the auditorium and hear suppressed giggles. When the dancer sat quietly on a chair, facing the audience, and looking pensively at the black shirt and trousers she had earlier carefully laid on the floor in the shape of a supine male figure, then proceeded to take off her bras, some people edged forward in their seats, some actually gasped and a number noisily left, including the Forum's photographer who was sitting next to me. He had not seemed to mind the dancer's scanty, feminine clothing which had occasionally treated us to glimpses of her underwear as she twisted and writhed, had in fact seemed to enjoy it judging by the constant clicking of his camera; the sight of a completely naked body, however, no matter how painfully fragile it looked, was too much for him and he fled in terror. Of course the dancer was not completely nude, as we discovered when she stood up and advanced towards us to lie down next to the black simulation of the male figure downstage; underneath her black underwear, she was wearing flesh coloured bras, tights and pants, but the photographer did not know this or wait to discover it. Though I liked the performance and thought it quite moving, the reaction of the audience provided a more thrilling drama which vividly reminded me of the tense excitement of an Iranian audience during a performance in Teheran when the wig worn by one of the actresses slipped back a little, momentarily revealing a bit of her real hair before she quickly pulled it back. Writing about this wig incident several years ago, I said that though it was accidental, yet it was the most daringly experimental moment in the whole of Al-Fajir Iranian festival. The curious thing in the case of this Polish show is that some foreign guests, including a Swede, were among those who left. As for me, I was positively delighted that director Marcin Herich, the founder of the Teatr A PART contemporary visual and physical theatre Group had shocked some and discomfited many. Such feelings are rare in theatre nowadays and I was grateful to the Forum, and to Doma, for showing more courage, artistic integrity and daring than the organizers of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre could ever be capable of. The CIFET who would never have admitted Hourglass in the first place, or would have heavily censored it if they did. Chapeau then to the Form and to Doma.
