The Second Egyptian National Theatre Festival ended last Thursday: Nehad Selaiha has mixed feelings The air inside the main hall of the Opera House last Thursday was thick with tense expectations and suppressed excitement. Like the opening, the closing ceremony of the 2nd Egyptian National Theatre Festival sported a substantial contingent of showbiz and media celebrities, especially invited this year by Ashraf Zaki, the chairman of the festival, to endow the event with an aura of glamour. While some of them were called to the stage to announce the honorary citations at the opening and others to hand out the awards at the closing, the rest were asked to do nothing but sit quietly and look beautiful. On both occasions, they adorned the front rows, providing a scintillating spectacle. Though not immediately or closely associated with theatre in the minds of the general public, most of the stars present had graced the boards at least once or twice in their lives. Nevertheless, a few nit picking, pernickety theatre critics and reporters viewed the presence of those who had not -- young film stars like Hind Sabri, Khaled Abul-Naga, or Menna Shalabi -- as an unwelcome intrusion and a "cheap" bid for publicity on the part of the festival's organisers. As if publicity were a demeaning vice that would immediately and automatically reduce the event to a kind of razzmatazz and should therefore be avoided at all costs, or that theatre could only thrive and retain its "dignity" in the shadows, away from the limelight. Such critics would have done better to concentrate on the substance of the festival rather than its glitzy covers. There, they would have founds targets more worthy of their vituperative energy. Though the technical preparation of the venues, the scheduling of performances and the general organisation of the festival this year were a big improvement on the first edition, with the majority of the shows starting on time, and with very few significant hitches, some of the performances barred from the contest were far superior to those inside, which made the process of selection quite suspect, and at least four of the awards bore the unsavoury taint of favouritism. In both respects, the festival's organisers could not be blamed. According to its statute, they are bound by the nominations of the internal selection committees appointed by the various theatre- producing bodies who apply to take part in the event either in or outside the contest. Each is allowed up to four productions, in rare cases (as happened with the cultural palaces and the universities union this year), five or even six, and it is completely up to their selection committees to decide which to compete. If the Union of Business Corporations, for instance, which holds its own annual theatre contest, proposes particular shows for the contest rather than others, no one can revise their decision, even if it becomes palpable they have made the wrong choice. The same goes for the nominations of the Egyptian Society of Theatre Amateurs, the Theatre Research and Training Society (both NGOs), the Youth Department of the Ministry of Culture, the Universities Union, the Cultural Palaces Organisation, the different companies of the State Theatre Organisation, Al-Hanager Centre, and the Theatre Institute at the Academy of Arts (all governmental agents). Only the independent groups selection committee is appointed by the festival board, and this year, in the interest of quality, it chose to enter only two works in the contest (see my "Time to catch up" on this page, 28 June, 2007). One assumes that any selection committee would automatically go for the best, if only to guard the prestige of the body it represents. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. A flagrant example this year was the baffling decision of the Union of Business Corporations to oust the workers of the Max Company for Salt in Alexandria from the running. Instead of their impressive and quite riveting Kafr Al-Tanahudat (The Hamlet of Sighs) which I mentioned in my article last Thursday -- a passionate musical adaptation of Ra'fat El-Dweri's Al-Waghish (The Pest), which replays the Electra/Orestes Greek revenge theme in rural Egypt, merging it with the old Arab epic of Al-Zir Salem and giving it topical political significance -- the jury were treated to the limp and pallid Al-Shahhat wa Al-Amirah (The Beggar and the Princess), by the Eastern Tobacco Company, and Al-Muharrig (The Clown), by the Suez Canal Company. Of the two, the former, featuring an insipid fairytale princess doomed to marry the scruffiest and most impecunious male on earth; a sponging intellectual who has mastered the art of mendicancy and does nothing but bootlick his benefactors while stoutly declaiming about freedom; a silly, fat ruler, with quivering folds of flesh, who, for some inscrutable reason, masquerades as a beggar to beat the intellectual at his chosen profession; and a string of farcical alms-givers, including a belly dancer, was the least digestible. The latter, though equally wishy-washy, at least carried traces of Mohamed Al-Maghout's inventive, satirical, political fantasy which has become a classic of the Syrian and Arab stage. In the case of the Cultural Palaces organisation, the conduct of its selection committee amounted to sheer, addle-brained stupidity; unable to make up its mind about the quality and nature of the available shows, and, perhaps, unwilling to upset anybody, it threw the whole lot into the furnace of the contest. The result was tragic: proposing Amr Qabil's Layali El-Hakim (Nights with El-Hakim) for the contest was not only unfair to the experiment and an instance of crass misjudgement, it also meant swelling up the number of works representing this organisation in the contest to nine. The Nights, which opened at Al-Zaqaziq cultural palace in the spring was a pioneering project which consisted of five plays by Tawfiq El-Hakim, performed in succession by the resident regional company there over a whole month (see my article, "Hakim galore" in this paper on 5 April, 2007). Such cultural projects are of great value to the local community and actors, have long-term benefits, and should be definitely encouraged; but one would be a fool to expect them to be appreciated, or make the right impression in the context of a festival. Predictably the jury balked at the idea of treating all five plays as one work, insisting on watching only one. And what they watched they judged out of context, by purely artistic standards, disregarding the fact that where cultural development is the target, questions of technical polish and finesse, though quite important, are of secondary value. The other cultural palaces contribution worth mentioning, a production of Sayed Darwish's 1920s' famous operetta, Al-Ashara Al-Tayeba (a punning title which could mean 'The Good Ten', or 'The Trump Card'), fared better with the jury, winning for one of its singers, Walaa' Tulba, the award for best rising female performer. Nevertheless, and thanks to the notorious indifference of the cultural palaces officials, none of whom put in an appearance at any of the shows in this event and who were conspicuous by their absence on the nights the companies in their charge performed, both Walaa and her comrades were robbed of the chance to perform this delightfully nostalgic piece on the Opera main stage in the final ceremony, in front of a huge, illustrious audience and a forest of television cameras. Think of what this could have meant for them, a small, struggling regional troupe. How they came to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity is a sadly farcical story that makes your blood boil. When Ashraf Zaki contacted them in the early hours of the morning of the final ceremony, asking them if they could perform that night, they were wild with joy. They agreed to meet at the Opera House at noon where its director, Abdel-Mon'im Kamel would be waiting for them to smooth out any difficulties and provide them with costumes and accessories, if they so wished, from the rich stores of the house. When by 5 in the afternoon they did not turn up, Zaki immediately sought an alternative and asked the Best- Choreography-Award winner, Diaa, to fill in the gap and present his Anbar Nimra Wahid (Ward No. 1), an offshoot of the Creativity Centre's dance workshop. Barely an hour later, Abdel-Maqsoud Ghoneim, the director of Al-Ashra rang up Zaki to say that they had finally resolved all their problems and were on their way; they had been waiting for permission to perform from the absconding officials of the cultural palaces and to find LE200 to cover the costs of transporting the sets, cast and crew, and that was what had made them late! Zaki pulls out his hair and yells: why didn't they tell me? The answer, which anyone cognizant of the goings on at the cultural palaces organisation and familiar with its rigid, hierarchical structure and internal power-struggles and feuds, would give him is that the company would have been severely punished for bypassing their (eternally absent) bosses and revealing the shameful inadequacy and preposterously lousy performance of this establishment. As for the Theatre Institute's productions, they seemed designed to demonstrate to people what NOT TO DO in theatre. None of them deserved any prizes and I was quite taken aback and dismayed when I learned that the strutting, squeaking, puny actor who botched up the part of Caligula, in the production of Albert Camus eponymous play, won the best rising actor award jointly with a delightful comedian from Masrah Al-Shabab (Youth Theatre). Later it transpired that, though still a student, he is currently acting in a television serial with the one member of the jury who fought tooth and nail to have him get this prize. One consolation, however, was that Mahmoud Sami's set for this mediocre performance was reasonably worthy of the award for best scenography he won. By comparison, the universities' productions seemed more imaginative, more ambitious. Though the actors consistently mangled the classical Arabic in which most of the plays were delivered, could not control their voices or breathing, and moved in a rather wooden, jerky manner, they had a lot of infectious enthusiasm and came up at times with some very interesting visual formations and scenic effects. Not surprisingly, given the spread of the veil in our universities and their increasingly repressive atmosphere, the males in these student productions far outnumbered the females and had the bigger parts. Only in the Cairo university production of Sa'dalla Wannus's iconoclastic Tuquus Al-Isharat wa Al-Tahawulat (Rites and Signs of Passage) could you find a proper "heroine". Though the three universities taking part in the festival presented seven productions, three by Ain Shams, two by Cairo and two by Hilwan, they only netted one minor award which went to Ain Shams's Al-Ekleel wa Al-Usfoor (Laurels and the Sparrow). Hilwan, the only one of the three that has an independent, full- fledged theatre department, failed to garner anything with either of its two entries. Of the top awards, the most disconcerting was the one granted to Yusri El-Guindi for best dramatic text. The text in question is an adumbrated, updated version of his 1968 voluminous, intractable, almost unactable, quasi-documentary play, Al-Yahoudi Al-Ta'ih (The Wandering Jew), which was presented at Al-Hanager earlier this year by director Hassan Al-Wazir under the name Al-Qadiyya (Cause) 2007 (see my review "Still wondering", dated 11 January, 2007). The first thought that came into my mind upon hearing of this award was that playwright Abul-'Ela Al-Salamouni, a member of the jury, was behind it all. Just as Yusri El-Guindi, as jury member last year, had made sure that the best dramatist award went to Al-Salamouni on the strength of an abridged, condensed version of one of his early texts, Ragul Al-Qal'aa (Man of the Citadel), which director Nasir Abdel-Mon'im prepared and staged over ten years ago and revived for the festival, now Al-Salamouni was paying back his debt to El-Guindi, nominating Hassan Al-Wazir's abridged, version of the old Wandering Jew for the top playwriting award and getting away with it. I could almost see El-Guindi thrusting the ball to his friend only to get it back in a man-to-man game. Definitely Osama Abdel-Fattah Nureddin's Ekleel Al-Ghar (Laurels), staged at Al-Tali'a in April this year by Shadi Sorour, (see review on this page on 3 May, 2007), or Mohamed Abul- Seoud's Antigone in Ramallah which he himself directed at Al-Hanager and was chosen to represent Egypt at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in September last year, were more worthy of this award. That Abul- Seoud got no more than a nomination for best director, Nadia El-Banhawi's critically acclaimed Ru'a (Visions), staged at Al-Tali'a earlier this year by Amr Qabil and superbly performed by Hanan Soliman (see "A Dip into the dark" on 22 March, 2007 on this page) walked away empty- handed, Lenin El-Ramly's incisive satirical warning against the infiltration of the Wahhabi, puritanical culture into Egyptian society, in Ikhla'u Al-Aqni'a (Off with the Masks), which he also directed for the National, was totally ignored, and Reem Higab's passionate, finely-textured performance in Antigone went unnoticed, struck me as grossly myopic and shockingly unfair. But for the many, richly-deserved prizes that went to Al-Tali'a's Laurels, Effat Yehia's The Memory of Water (an independent theatre production by her Al-Qafila, or Caravan, troupe), and Masrah Al-Shabab's A Boy, A Girl and Other Things, the jury would have been irredeemably discredited in my view. I could go on and on; but I think I had better now give you the prizes in detail and save the rest of the stories and comments for later. The festival awards -- Best performance (LE15,000): Laurels, Al-Tali'a theatre. -- Best director (LE15,000): Shadi Sorour, for Laurels. -- Best rising director (LE10,000): Effat Yehya, for Memory of Water, Al-Qafila troupe. -- Best playwright (LE15,000): Yusri El-Guindi, Al-Qadiyya 2007. -- Best rising playwright (LE10,000): Osama Abdel-Fattah Nureddin for Laurels, jointly with Rasha Abdel-Mon'im for A Boy, A Girl, and Other Things. -- Best actor (LE15,000): Ahmed Halawa for Al-Qadiyya 2007, jointly with Yusef Dawood for Life is Beautiful. -- Best supporting actor (LE10,000): Khalil Mursi for Laurels. -- Best rising actor (LE10,000): Haytham Mohamed for Caligula, jointly with Amr Abdel-Aziz for his part in Masrah Al-Shabab's Ma Tiqlaqsh (Don't Worry), an adaptation of Tawfiq El-Hakim's Bank Al-Qalaq (Anxiety Bank). -- Best actress (LE15,000): Mu'tazza Abdel-Sabour for The Memory of Water. -- Best supporting actress (LE10,000): Abeer Adel for Kayd Al-Nisaa (Women's Stratagems). -- Best rising actress (LE10,000): Aya Hemeida (who replaced Mona Hala in Walad wi Bint wi Hagat (A Boy, A Girl, and Other Things), jointly with Walaa' Tulba for Al-Ashara Al-Tayeba. -- Best music (LE10,000): Tariq Mahran for Laurels. -- Best scenography (LE10,000: Mahmoud Sami for Caligula. -- Best choreography (LE10,000): Dia for Ward No. 1. -- Best costumes (LE10,000): Marwa Atiyya for Ward No. 1, jointly with the costume designer of the theatre institute's Rashomon. -- Three special Jury awards, each worth LE5,000 went collectively to: Galal El-Sharqawi's young cast in The Merchant of Venice (Masrah Al-Fann); the production team of Ain Shams University's Al-Ekleel wa Al-Usfour (Laurels and the Sparrow); and the members of the Beni Mazar company for their production of Sa'dalla Wannus's epic play, Munamnamat Tarikhiya (Historical Miniatures).
