Nehad Selaiha is introduced to a new bunch of playwrights at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Discovering one talented playwright can keep me awake for almost a week. Imagine then my meeting a whole bunch of them, and not just through their writing, but actually in the flesh. This year, the publication programme sponsored by the Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups launched in its 5th edition Arabic translations of 6 new dramatic texts by foreign authors from different cultures, publishing them in a bilingual form, and hosting their authors and interpreters in an open meeting with the public on 4th February at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria. Though the Polish Tomasz Kaczmarek could not make the trip to Alexandria, Hanaa Abdel Fattah (from Egypt) and Dorota Metwaly (from Poland), the translators of his Matka Cierpiaca, Czyli matka courage w bloku (The Suffering/Insufferable Mother, or mother courage of the tenements), were there to represent him, introduce his work and talk about the play. As the subtitle indicates, Matka, the eponymous character, is a sardonic reworking of Bertolt Brecht's world-famous, money-grubbing 'Mother'. Like Mother Courage, Kaczmarek's 'suffering/insufferable' Matka is maniacally obsessed with a single, overwhelming passion, but this time not for money, as in the canteen owner's case, but for religious purity and cleanliness. In her frenzied crusade to protect herself and family from the pollution she sees rampant in the outside world, she starts with shutting family members all up inside their shabby, cramped flat, stabbing her own niece to death with a broomstick when she comes to visit before she even crosses the door step, barring the outside door against her own daughter's return when she dares to leave, then cutting down everybody's food allowance to starvation point, locking up the fridge, ending up barricading the doors of the bathroom and the kitchen where her sick son and famished husband have retired, to seek relief. In all of this, she is dogmatically impelled by her strict religious principles which though they give her a chronic itch, leave her without a single qualm of conscience. At last, when she has managed to physically spirit away her husband and two children in her zeal to save their souls, and is left completely alone in the living room, with all the furniture heaped against the doors, and a reeking toilet pot slap in the middle, she is visited by the angel of death, a hugely ironical gentle, winged, white vision, and she prepares to join him in a state of beatific euphoria, confident that she has fulfilled her duty and sacred mission as (smothering) Mother. Though it draws heavily on the tradition of the Absurd, in terms of language, characters, atmosphere and black humour, often reminding one of Eugene Ionesco's technique of progressively distorting a quasi- realistic family setting until it turns into a veritable nightmare, more than anything, Kaczmarek's Matka Cierpiaca is a barbed satire, hugely grotesque and relentlessly unsparing, on religious fundamentalism and dogma. Here, as in Egyptian folk tales, the dark side of motherhood, which the collective, Egyptian popular imagination enshrined in the sinister image of Umina El-Ghoula, or 'our mother, the she-ogre', is foregrounded and metaphorically posited as the reservoir of all life-threatening dogma. Reading Kaczmarek's Matka leaves you, despite the gruesome humour, with a nasty, putrid smell and an acrid taste of dust and ashes. In the case of the Dutch Oscar van Woensel, we were less fortunate. Neither he nor his translators (Ahmed Al-Rikaby and Salah Hassan, who both live in Holland) could join us. His text, however, was there, and in eminently actable Arabic. Tussen ons gezegd en gezwegen (All that We Said and Left Unsaid), an ingeniously cryptic and intriguingly subtle two- hander in the style of Harold Pinter, explores the painful tensions in the relationship of two brothers, Bart and Bram, both artists (the first, a painter, the other, a musician), and challenges us to guess the reasons why they agreed, after their parents died in an air crash, leaving them a fortune, and after both had married, to meet only once every ten years. A short author's note at the beginning tells us that they were supposed to meet at 11 in the morning and spend the whole day together, but could not make it till four in the afternoon when they had each a beer at a pub, then went for a walk in the nearby woods, only to find themselves at 5 pm at another pub for another drink. At 7, they take a leisurely dinner at a posh Italian restaurant, with more drinks, and end up, an hour past midnight, at the deserted family home, which both are reluctant to sell, sharing a bottle of expensive cognac provided by Bart, the wine connoisseur, as he likes to think. The play records the last round, at the family home, and the dialogue proceeds as a series of evasions, interspersed with lots of petty talk, polite, conciliatory phrases and meaningless remarks. Every real subject seems foreclosed for both: their childhood, their families, their parents, their failed love lives and their respective arts. A casual conversation between strangers on a train, you would think, except that in the case of the twins, the gaps and silences, the interrupted thoughts and unfinished sentences seem to reveal more about them, their existential plights, fear of human contact and sense of futility than would be the case among strangers. By the end of the play, we feel we know more about them, their unconfessed anxieties and failed hopes, than if they had talked openly and candidly to each other; and as they say goodbye at the end, with a hesitant, embarrassed, brief embrace, we actually feel pity for them, knowing that each will go a cold, lonely way, shorn of hopes and dreams, with no comfort in sight except, perhaps, in death. It would have been lovely to have Oscar van Woensel amongst us and everyone was sorry that neither he, nor his translators could come. However, the Scottish Yvonne Caddell, the Austrian Rosemarie Poiarkov, the Tunisian Hakim Marzougui and the Slovenian Maja Gal Stromar were present (the first three with their translators -- respectively, Amira Nouweira, Wisam Ibrahim and Laila Hilmi) and could speak to us directly about their work, answer questions and sign copies. And as if to make up for the absence of her two competent translators (the Egyptian Mohsen El-Hadi and his Slovenian wife Margret who live in her home country), our beautiful Slovenian guest, Maja Gal Stromar, who is also a distinguished actress, trained at the Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, treated us to an enchanting reading of part of her one- woman poetic monologue in its original language while we followed its Arabic translation in print. It was a strange experience: as her rich, warm voice filled the room, rising and falling in soft and vibrant modulations, it seemed to cast a spell, shading and colouring the words, causing them to come alive and fly off the page. She wrote this monologue, she said, as a kind of therapy, in response to a spiritual need -- a need to define herself and her position in the world and to protest against all its ills. This is why she called it Alma Ajka, which means 'time for the soul'. Maja's name itself (pronounced 'Maya'), which signifies 'water' in Arabic and the goddess of illusion in Hinduism, could, perhaps, explain this urgent need for self-definition, she jocularly remarked. Imagine a person made up of water and illusion, combining fluidity, transparency and the transient vividness of airy visions! Her dramatic monologue, or, rather, poem, is punctuated with music, songs, the sound of wind, the ringing of bells and the cries of seagulls; despite its furious, often sarcastically bitter, and occasionally obscenely abusive denunciation of the ruthlessness of politics, the brutalities of war, the dehumanizing hypocrisy and materialism of business, social, and family life, and the complete and soul-shriveling failure of real human communication, it ends on a hopeful note, with the voice of the sea announcing that now was the time for the soul and urging the audience to look for their real, spiritual homes and to feed their hungry souls on dreams until they glow with the unique joy of life, like butterflies made of flames. Reading Stromar's Alma and Kaczmarek's Matka in succession generates an interesting dialectic concerning the nature of passionate spiritual longings and religious needs and their ethical consequences on those around. The same dialectic informs Hakim Marzougui's Bissat Ahmadi (idiomatically, the all embracing rug where all can sit, openly speak their minds and behave quite naturally, without ceremony). Here, as in van Woensel's All that We Said, we meet two estranged brothers -- Ishaq, the legitimate son and heir of a Syrian rug-maker and dealer, and his illegitimate French brother, Julian, the fruit of a brief affair between his father and a French historian who once came to Damascus to research the history of oriental carpets. Using the conventional formula of the 'skeleton- in-the-cupboard' plot, with its titillating sexual mysteries and subsequent (mandatory) sensational revelations, Marzougui launched an imaginative investigation into the meaning and promptings of religious faith, contrasting the lenient, popular version of Islam embraced by Ishaq to the rigid, puritanical one adopted by the newly converted French Julian, or Galal Eddin. The play ends on an ambiguous note, leaving the two brothers locked in mortal conflict and hanging to the same explosives belt worn by Julian which threatens to go off an any time. Calling one of the brothers Jacob, ineluctably calls to mind the biblical story of Jacob and Esauand invests the plot with topical political meanings. And herein lies the problem. In the Old Testatement, Jacob, with the help of his wily mother, Rebecca, who dresses him in the furry skin of a goat, supplants his brother Esau and gets, by deceit, Isaac's blessings, the equivalent in the play of the carpet business and the rug-shop. Esau, on the other hand, as the audience are persuaded to view the French Julian, is promised a whole nation in recompense. The time will come, Isaac tells Esau, "when you will assert your independence, and become the father of a nation that will be known as Edom". But since Julian/Esau in the play is a Christian Frenchman turned Islamic terrorist, one is left in doubt as to Marzougui's message and as to who exactly will inherit the kingdom of the earth: the Arabs, the Israelis, or the religious fundamentalists on both, and all sides? Predictably, Marzougui made maximum comic capital out of the linguistic errors of Julian and Jacob's easygoing interpretation of Islamic conduct and this is what ultimately saved the play, which was performed in the course of the Forum, from simply coming across as an ideologically muddled, slogan-mongering, spuriously sensational political statement. In fact, both the play in text and performance left me, and probably many others, sympathizing with Esau, or the terrorist Julian, and this, to my mind, disastrously runs contrary to the author's purpose. Equally muddled, or, to put it more charitably, impenetrably, ambiguous, is Yvonne Caddell's Everybody's Baby. The indefinable setting, on the borders of 'a Desert City', with the sounds of bombs and warplanes circling the place and blinding electric beams flashing in all directions, the fact that the 'Baby' of the title has crude oil coming out of her tongue and seems to belong nowhere, and that she and her 'guardian' are locked in an incomprehensible love-hate relationship carry a lot of political potential. Caddell, however, fails to develop it and the play, despite its teasingly evocative atmosphere, poetic language and structure, and subtle, topical allusions to the Gulf wars remains elusive and hauntingly baffling. Though less poetically ambitious, Rosemarie Poiarkov's Kuchenliegen (Lying down in the Kitchen) proved more poignant and quite lucid. Zoran, Katharina and Peter are old pals and former university colleagues who inhabit a small flat in a big city and spend their time chattering and lying around in the kitchen watching television. Each has a dream which, though eternally postponed, acts as a life supporting system. Their relationship looks cozy on the surface, but, as the play progressively reveals, is actually a cover for their impotence and an escapist refuge from facing up to the world. As far as they are concerned, the world can go its own merry way on television, wrecking everything and decimating nations, while they lie down lethargically, watching it go by. And who could blame them, since individuals have been rendered hopelessly ineffectual in today's world of globalized economy, multinational corporations and single super power. More texts followed, in the form of verbal and non-verbal performance scripts and some of them, like the Lithuanian Drowned Valley and Songs of a Medieval Fellow, , from France, the Algerian Taos Khazem's Tizi Ouzou, the Slovenian Maska Ljubljana's Oblivion, the Finnish Death of a Scarecrow, and the Austrian Life is not a Picnic are worth dwelling on and analyzing at length. The Forum also featured two takes on Shakespeare's Hamlet, from Croatia and Italy, two session of Al-Hakaya (Stories) pan-Arab project, several interesting workshops, a plastic arts exhibition and a presentation about the marvelous Philippe Genty by Eric de Sarria entitled "The Labyrinth of Memories." But more of this later. 5th Creative Forum for Independent Theatre Groups, Arts Centre, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 1-10 February, 2008.
