Nehad Selaiha finds much to applaud at the sixth El-Saqia Independent Theatre Festival I literally dragged myself to El-Saqia's festival for independent theatre. It was only a week after the end of the third national theatre festival and the prospect of another 11 days of intensive theatre watching (from 24 July to 4 August, with a break on 30 July) seemed quite daunting and positively cruel. It felt more of an ordeal when I remembered how disheartening the last year's festival was and I was strongly tempted to give it a miss. And what a horrendous loss this would have been. Apart from anything, I would have missed the chance of discovering two plays by Brecht which I hadn't come across before, not to mention a delightful Dario Fo piece hitherto unknown to me. Jacinto Benavente's Spanish Classic, La Malquerida, known in English as The Passion Flower, was there too, on stage, for the first time in Egypt. Indeed, at no other year has this festival displayed such a variety of texts, both local and foreign, representing different cultures, trends and modes of writing. This has led me to think that the theatre of the fringe should be judged not only by the artistic merits of the performances it offers, or the ingenuity of its artists in overcoming budget restrictions and making a little money go a very long way, but also, and to my mind more importantly, by its knowledge of what is happening on the fringe theatre scene in other countries, its exploration of the local and international dramatic heritage and its daring in tackling and airing neglected texts. An English version of Brecht's How Much Is Your Iron? translated by Edna Walsh and directed by Orla O'Loughlin, was staged at the Young Vic in London last year, on 24 April, as part of a season to celebrate some of the German master's early and rarely staged works. A review by Michael Billington in The Guardian the following day alerted director Wisam El-Medani, the founder of the Egyptian VIP independent troupe, to the existence of the play and he soon got hold of it and set about adapting it to remove its direct European references and project its message as universally valid. Written in Sweden, where Brecht had taken refuge after the rise of the Nazis to power, the play was intended as a comic parable to warn the Swedes of the danger of supplying iron ore to Nazi Germany. Its characters, therefore, are thinly disguised symbols of the European powers at loggerheads during that time, very much in the manner of medieval allegories and morality plays. Besides Svendson, the iron merchant who clearly indicates Sweden, and his best, most frequent, nameless and bullying customer who obviously stands for Germany, we have Herr Austrian, Frau Czech, Herr Britt and Frau Gall. Such names would mean nothing to an Egyptian audience or, at best, befuddle them; but though most of them were changed in the Egyptian adaptation, removing the play from its immediate historical context in 1939 Europe, the adaptor/director wisely refrained from replacing one historical context with another, more relevant one, resetting the play in any definite place or time, or forcing upon it a local, topical political reading. The temptation to do so is obvious and would have proved irresistible in other hands. I shudder to think how another director would have eagerly replaced Herr Svendson with 'El-Sayed El-Masri' (Mr. Egyptian) and cast the Customer (Germany) in the stereotype of the Jew in Egyptian drama. Read with the Arab/Israeli conflict in mind, the play readily invites such an interpretation; but it is to the credit of Wisam Medani that he did not force it upon the audience and left them free to arrive at their own. Here, the setting and atmosphere remained vaguely foreign and unfamiliar, and the use of classical Arabic in the dialogue enforced the alienation effect. With the stage simply dressed to suggest an iron store, its rotund owner pitched on the highest level in the auditorium and constantly rushing down to meet his customers, and the actors appearing from side doors in the auditorium and occasionally wondering among the audience so that, imaginatively, the auditorium becomes an extension of the shop on stage, the performance achieved two seemingly contradictory effects: on the one hand stressing the theatricality of the experience and precluding any chance of illusionism or emotional identification, and, on the other, suggesting to us, the audience, that we are in the same boat with the shop-keeper and his customers, as guilty of indifference, greed and ethical blindness as he is, and as much subject to the same threat from the ruthless killer as the other victims are. Wisam Medani's version of How Much Is Your Iron? came across as a parody of a grisly, suspenseful thriller, involving a serial killer, with bouts of farcical comedy, mainly provided by the iron-merchant. Brecht's warning against the growing menace of Nazi Germany became generalised into a humane warning against indifference to the suffering of others. That you cannot seek your own salvation individually without fighting for the salvation of all the poor and oppressed was a message often declaimed from the stage in our socialist 1960s. Voiced in the year 2008, it sounded like a cruel sneer at the dreams and beliefs of my generation and must have struck the younger members in the audience, who have to virtually turn somersaults to avoid the slings and arrows of an outrageous, globalised world, as ridiculously idealistic. Still, I cannot but think that such a message is what makes How Much Is Your Iron? still relevant today. The other Brecht play in the festival was another lehrstucke, another didactic piece, equally unknown, with an identical message, but this time with children involved in the performance. Murabbi El-Khanazeer (The Pig Farmer) was unearthed by Omar Saleh and featured Hamada Shousha, in typical cowboy getup, including the emblematic, wide-brimmed hat, as the thug who terrorises a small pig farmer and his herd and ends up massacring all the shopkeepers in the town and taking over their businesses. Like the iron merchant in How Much Is Your Iron? the clownish pig-farmer here keeps hoping against hope that the American intruder who has forcibly taken possession of his neighbours' shops, one after the other, would somehow, miraculously, spare him and his fledgling herd of little piglets. Need I tell you the outcome? That individual salvation is a hoax, a literary illusion and a decadent dream fabricated by capitalist societies was the message here as much as in How Much Is Your Iron? Also wildly farcical and pungently political was Abdallah El-Sha'er's adaptation of Dario Fo's anti-American satire, La signora è da buttare (The Lady is Only Fit for Throwing Away), renamed 20 B, Liberty Square, a cunning title which at once hints that the 'Lady' in the play is in fact the American Statue of Liberty and quotes the name of the abandoned, dilapidated building in central Milan, called the Palazzina Liberty, formerly an indoor vegetable market, which Fo and Franca Rame made the home of their third major theatre group, the Colletive Teatrale La Comune in the 1970s. Featuring two circuses ideologically and physically at war, one conservative and capitalist, the other progressive and revolutionary, the production, dizzyingly colourful and boisterous, drew freely on Brechtian techniques, the arts of clowning and the traditions of farce and popular comedy to put across its political message. Mohamed Gamal's abridged version of Ali Salem's 1960s' mordant political satire, Afareet Masr El-Gedidah (Demons of Heliopolis), rechristened Al-Lailah Al-Akhirah, was projected as a tale told by an idiot, the idiot in this case being a grotesque, puppet-like male in drag posing as Sheherezade, accompanied by an equally clownish Shahrayar. Competently directed by Khalid Nabil Abbas for his Al-Murshideen (Guides) troupe, it tuned well with the general ideological tenor of the festival and its political drive, coming across as a quasi- realistic protest against totalitarianism, military regimes and police states. Live Concepts's production of Yusef Idris's Al-Mahzalah Al-Ardiyyah (Global Farce), directed by its founder, Mohamed Nasrat El-Aqabawi, and Gamal Abdel-Maqsoud's Al-Ragul Alladhi Akal Wizah (The Man Who Ate a Goose), staged by Mohamed Labib for his Al-Hadaf (The Target) troupe partook of the same style and political orientation. A similarly depressing and wryly satirical reading of the current Arab political scene was also present in two allegorical plays which draw upon Arab history without being strictly historical: Al-Muharig (The Clown), by Syrian poet and playwright Mohamed El-Maghout, adapted and directed by Mustafa Magdi for his Infiniti troupe, and Osama Nurredin's Aegeus, adapted and directed by Mohamed Ragab El-Khatib's and performed by his Hayat (Life) group under the title, Al-Gezira (The Island). With so many political plays around and the spirit of agit-prop very much in evidence, it was quite a jolt finding oneself trapped in the sultry, sex-and-violence triangle of Benavente's Spanish rustic tragedy, The Passion Flower. The original play is straightforwardly naturalistic in design, very much like O'Neil's Desire Under the Elms ; but director Yusra El-Sharqawi, the founder of the Waves troupe who performed the play, seemed to think that the melodramatic, sensational plot, involving incest and murder, would feel too vulgar if rendered as a sequential narrative in the realistic/ naturalistic tradition, that is, the way it was written. She, therefore, tore down the text, reducing it to its basic, elementary building blocks and reorganized them in a different way, splitting the central character, the daughter, Acacia, into two characters, and casting the whole play in the form of a trial-cum-psychological drama in which Juliana, Acacia's servant, acts both as prosecution and alter ego. Projected from two contradictory perspectives, with the same scenes played more than once in different ways and to different ends, the story becomes intriguingly problematic and ambiguous, and Benavente's text casts off its traditional naturalistic robes and dons new, postmodernist ones. Psychological drama, with the idea of the split self, the doppelganger, or alter ego, as thematic matrix and action propeller, was to surface, yet again, in Ahmed Subhi's production of Lenin El-Ramli's I'qal ya Doctoor (Wise up Doctor) for Al-Handasa (Faculty of Engineering) group, and the same author's play, Afreet Li Kul Muwatin (A Demon for Every Citizen), directed by Mohamed Khuleif and performed by the Cue troupe. In both plays, however, the psychological paraphernalia are used to process a critical socio- political message, quite in tune with the messages encoded in so many of the plays in this festival. The same could be said of Ahmed Halawa's Daqit Mazzika (Musical Beat), a hilarious social satire in which madness is used as a metaphor for protest and rejection. Directed by Walid Tal'at and performed by the Harmony troupe, it showed us a bunch of lunatics undergoing musical therapy in a farcical asylum and tracing their individual traumas to their roots in social and political oppression. Besides their delightful conjuring up of El-Ramli's Afreet, the Cue troupe (formerly Charisma) also presented a visually thrilling and highly disciplined production of Maurice Dekobra's Carnaval des Revenants (Carnival of Ghosts), this time, with Ahmed Seif as director. That this troupe could proficiently tackle two such extremely demanding texts with two gifted directors and two different casts, both large, was proof of an impressive abundance of theatrical talent, group cohesion and boundless dedication. No wonder their Afreet and Carnaval scooped the first and third awards for best production, the awards for best director (Ahmed Seif) and best scenography, together with five certificates of merit for acting. As for new writers, barring Osama Nurredin, whose Laurels scooped 6 awards at the National Theatre Festival last year, the sixth El-Saqia Independent Theatre Festival introduced two new and extremely promising playwrights: Mohsen Yusef from Egypt and Saleh Karama from the United Arab Emirates. Yusef's La Ahad La Shai' (No one and Nothing) was a philosophical questioning of the meaning of identity and existence and the relation of artistic creativity to reality, life and death; Karama's Hawel Marra Ukhra (Try Again), featuring a woman condemned to death for killing her adulterous husband while sparing the life of her best friend who was her husband's partner in crime, was similarly existentialist in its discussion of the meanings of guilt, ethical responsibility and the right of the individual to choose her own self-defining act, even if it is an act of self-annihilation. How many plays have I mentioned? I have lost count. There were 21 one performances in all, and though driving to El-Saqia every day, for 11 days, at 5 pm in this heat made me the butt of many witty sallies by friends and relatives, I would not have missed this festival for anything. For me, it was both a pleasure and an education. Sixth El-Saqia Independent Theatre Festival, 24 July to 4 August, 2008.
