Amira El-Noshokaty enjoys reading some of the shortest plays ever A few days ago the second edition of 's first collection of short plays, A Shoe Full of Events: Please Don't Move (Gazma Malieaa bel Ahdath: Argook ma tetharaksh), was published by Merit. This compilation of 44 short plays, or "mini-dramas", is part of the total of 160 that Sharaf has written. While each of them is an entity in its own right, they are all attached by an underlying rhythm that ties them all together and keeps the flow. The plays are set in a rather unusual short form, but succeed in capturing the essence of the personal quests by featuring the rituals of daily life and the monologues that one can be trapped in but seldom bring into the open. With no promises or solutions, the mini-plays give a voice to those endless questions lingering in one's mind. In the monologue "We Say That There Was Something", a 12-year-old boy shares his view of the world: "When we look at the world, you realise we are still dreaming of a desert, while living in one. You hear the drums of war that accompany you wherever you go, and despite looking for the source of such drums you never find it; it stays inside you until the funeral drums escort you to the source of voices." On another level, "Scared" portrays a man standing on a higher level than the rest of his group and contemplating how lonely it is to be on top. On a parallel note, "Shadow and Man" is a dialogue between a man and his shadow; the man is afraid of the darkness of his own shadow. The shadow, on the other hand, hides behind the man, fearing the light that created it in the first place. Sharaf explains how, over the course of a year, he made voice recordings and played them back to himself, listening to the words and adjusting the scenes according to impact to help create the right tempo. "So you will have always parallel themes, take the characters, that of the girl and boy, the boy alone, the mono drama, the poet... they are constants in various plays," Sharaf told Al-Ahram Weekly. "As for the structure of the plays, the first and the last end on the same note: with people awaiting the saviour who does not come." One question resonates through the plays: why man, despite being formed from dust, washes away any dirt that he might touch, to the saviour that everybody counts on to change their lives, one that never comes. The plays depict scenes from the characters' lives that convey the isolation, personal tragedies, and the mostly satirical of the status quo in a short and direct way. "I think that whatever I want to say should be direct, short and to the point. I created works that resemble the people living in this day and age," Sharaf told the Weekly. "The political causes in the Arab world are no longer grand, like they were in the 1960s when there were wars and various global crises. Nowadays our crisis is of an individual nature. Therefore, literary works are also on an individual level." Sharaf suggests that even the science of beauty tallies with his belief. In the olden days people used to carve statues that were way bigger than they were, then gradually they became similar in size, and then much smaller. "The more we grow, the more the world isn't big enough. That's why," he adds, "most literary works in general are on an individual level nowadays." Unlike most playwrights, Sharaf published his mini-drama collection to be read and not necessarily played on stage. "My aim is to let people enjoy reading plays just like they enjoy novels and poetry. I believe that a written play is a form of literature; like the cinema scripts written by Mustafa Zekri, for example, it is written as a literary form and is published and widely read as such," Sharaf argues. He explained that he targets readers other than an audience; hence adopting the idea of the literary playwright which is established abroad and is quite a novelty to us, for we are in a sense attached to the public audience. "On another level, we lack the culture of theatre, for neither are you able to say everything you want to say on stage, nor is there enough of an audience, if any, to interact with. Theatre audiences are scant and do not measure up to those watching a football match between Ahli and Assiut Cement," Sharaf laments the status quo of the theatre, while remembering how the 1960s was a much more prosperous era. "In the 1960s, he says, "it was different. Media venues were limited to two local television channels besides cinema, theatre and radio, so the theatre was a kind of outing." But make no mistake; Sharaf believes that variety is the spice of life. "I don't know why people despise the commercial theatre. I am not against having theatre as such, but in the meantime it shouldn't be this type alone. Government theatre, on the other hand, mostly features international plays; and on the few occasions they allow local plays they insist on specific actors that are employees of the government theatre -- and no others. What about those who want to watch something else? And those who write, where are they supposed to go?" Although Sharaf's first, this collection of mini-dramas is the first Egyptian drama of its genre to be translated and performed in Norway in Ibsen's Theatre, a rather happy deviation from the way his collection was first perceived -- he first aimed to publish it as part of the Ministry of Culture's series for young writers. The ministry refrained from publishing it because it refused to call then plays and wanted to publish them as texts. Other publishing houses took the same stand, until Merit publishers went ahead and published two editions. Sharaf has written his share of plays and scripts. He writes, directs, and writes children comics and poems. He is currently writing a screenplay and will direct his first sitcom.
