Nehad Selaiha finds no mirth in the Week of Laughter festival held from 10 to 16 July In an attempt to lighten the thick pall of gloom that has descended upon Egypt in recent years, making its once cheerful and easygoing people glum and morose and unwontedly aggressive, and triggering a spiraling wave of violence never witnessed before, Ashraf Zaki, the acting head of the state theatre organization, suddenly decided, in a moment of reckless bravado, even while the 1st Youth Theatre Encounter he launched on 1st June was still in full swing, to hold yet another one-week festival, this time dedicated to comedy and laughter, and initially set the date of the opening for 1st July. The purpose of this event, as it was hyped in the press, was to discover new comic playwrights and texts, which meant excluding all foreign plays and any local comedy that has been staged before. It also meant that in the 3 weeks between the burgeoning of the idea and the set date of the opening, Zaki believed that his team of assistants could 6 new Egyptian comedies at least and find directors willing to stage them at such an unbelievably short notice. Though the idea of scouting for new comic playwrights is in itself laudable, Zaki's 'optimism' in respect of the time needed for the task struck me as horrendously foolish and unrealistic. Moreover, the sudden announcement of this new festival created a lot of confusion in theatrical circles, leading many to wonder if the annual Egyptian National Theatre Festival, the previous editions of which were regularly held on 1st July, would be cancelled this year. As it transpired, the new festival finally opened on 10 July, while the older one was postponed till 17 July, opening on the night immediately following the closing ceremony of the Laughter week. Many critics found this feverish rush quite baffling and some accused Zaki of frantically striving after media exposure (of wanting to be always in the news, opening festivals and honouring old stars) at the expense of quality. Predictably, the quality of plays on offer at the Week of Laughter festival was deeply disappointing. Of the festival's 6 plays, the 4 I watched were naïve and half baked, thoroughly lacking in wit and technical finesse. When I remonstrated with one of Zaki's assistants over the low standard of the plays, he credited my complaint and apologetically said that out of the 37 texts they received in response to their 'call for plays' (a call that neither I nor anyone I know saw or heard about), those were the best. With more time on their hands, he confessed, they could have consulted the lists of award-winning plays in the past 10 years at least, since most of these have not been performed and seemed doomed to remain on the shelves gathering dust. As it was, they had no time and had to do with what they were offered. No good can come out of such heedless haste. Comedy, in all its varieties, is a difficult art, perhaps more difficult than tragedy or any other dramatic genre, and requires wit, intelligence, experience and craftsmanship. Such requirements were palpably lacking in the four so-called comedies I watched -- namely, Mustafa Hamdi's Lamma Roohi Til'et (When my Spirit Left My Body), directed by Ahmed Seif, Osama El-Masri's Sheeka Beeka (Shake, Rattle and Roll), directed by Yasir Attiya, Mustafa Musa's Bas Tagreebi (a title that plays on the words 'bas', meaning 'only', and 'beth', meaning 'transition', and can best translate as 'Only a Try-out Transmission'), directed by Nihal Ahmed, and (the mysteriously hyphenated) Os-kar, written and directed by Abdallah El-Sha'er. All four plays strive to appear as socio-political satires on current Egyptian reality and superficially deal with such salient topical issues as poverty, unemployment, corruption, oppression, alienation, drugs and the degradation of the arts, the media and all other human activities and values. All begin with a potentially promising situation which they miserably fail to develop or comically explore, opting instead for a series of disconnected, carelessly written sketches that heavily rely on parody and burlesque and consist mainly of sexual innuendoes, scatological wordplay, coarse jokes, mainly leveled at homosexuals, clumsy verbal and physical gags and grotesque postures and movement patterns. In Sheeka Beeka, the theme of the struggle for political power is presented through an array of feeble-minded, idiotic characters, led by the sultan's favourite odalisque who alternately appears as a mercenary schemer and patriotic heroine, changing characters from sketch to sketch for no rhyme or reason except to suit the author's whim. Rather than engage in conflict, the characters, if you can call them such, keep rushing back and forth between the sultan's palace and the prison at the mere verbal announcement of a new coup d'etat. In the constant hustle and bustle, you lose interest in what is happening and get thoroughly sick and tired of the poor actors' vigorous attempts to tickle you into laughter with their heavy-handed humour and strenuous, ridiculously inane antics. Bas Tagreebi offers a similar assembly of silly, thinly outlined characters who, in this case, are engaged in launching a new, private satellite television channel, and consists of a series of sloppy sketches burlesquing familiar television programmes and chat shows in a clumsily exaggerated manner. The initial conflict between the unscrupulously commercial and viciously ignorant director of the channel and his morally upright, cultured friend and assistant, who defends the ethics of the profession and is summarily kicked out as a result, is almost still born and does not develop beyond the first scene. Though this friend is furiously and vociferously blamed by the sloppy director for anything that goes wrong, he remains conspicuous by his absence as the show goes merrily on. At the end, however, he suddenly materializes to announce that he had somehow managed to stop the channel's transmission and, as a result, the public were mercifully spared its trashy, poisonous offerings. No such luck for us, the audience, who had suffered it all. In the case of Os-kar, the setting was a circus with clowns and acrobats; but rather than treat us to a comedy of circus life or a display of circus arts, the play soon took off in a completely unexpected direction, carrying the action, figuratively, into the realm of international politics, and, physically, into outer space! Cashing in (as an after thought, perhaps) on the much publicized current dispute between Egypt and the upstream Nile countries over their demand to recalibrate traditional shares of the Nile water, the author suddenly introduces the problem of the shortage of water into the play through the circus manager who blames it on the building of dams by neighboring circuses. To solve the water problem, he decides to send a space ship to the moon, manned by the circus clown, his homely, illiterate wife and stupid son, to look for water there, thus bouncing the play abruptly from the realistic level onto the plane of fantasy and science fiction. From that moment onwards, the stage was divided into a back set, representing the space ship, suspended in midair and floating among the stars, and a front set, representing the control station on earth. The action, if you can call it that, consisted of the problems faced by the foolish crew, which were verbally 'reported' rather than enacted and 'shown', and the inept, labouredly farcical attempts of the circus manager and his assistants to solve them. Predictably, given the general stupidity and ignorance of everyone in sight, the space mission fails; moreover, not only does the space craft lose its way to the moon, it also, on the way, infringes the space domain of a neighbouring circus/state. This promptly brings on the scene of the control station an Obama-like figure, colourfully dressed as an African chieftain and thundering awesome threats. Finally, however, the beleaguered circus manager, who is about to capitulate and give in to all the demands of his superiour foreign adversary, is saved by the intervention of another super circus/power. In the middle of all of this, water problem which triggered the whole action gets curiously forgotten. In the hands of a more experienced playwright, the initial situation and general conception of Os-kar could have been developed into a coherent and highly amusing political satire. The problem here, as with the rest of the plays in this festival, albeit in varying degrees, was not that the playwrights lacked ideas or imagination, but, rather, that they lacked the necessary craftsmanship and did not know how to construct and develop a comic situation and exploit its inbuilt paradoxes and contradictions in writing their dialogue. Even in Lamma Roohi Til'et --relatively the most developed of the four plays and, therefore, the least frustrating -- this lack of craftsmanship was quite obvious. Conceived as a morality play, in the tradition of Everyman, Lamma Roohi Til'et begins in a quasi-realistic vein with the enactment of the last few hours in the life of an impoverished, unemployed, sexually frustrated and daily humiliated old university student before he commits suicide. In that initial sequence, which forcefully displays the hero's misery and impotence through a series of conventional comical confrontations between him and his debtors and bullies, including his loud and shrewish landlady, who taunts him with having repeatedly failing his exams, and her daughter, who has jilted him for a stronger, richer suitor, the author paves the way for the subsequent flight into fantasy by introducing the hero's hash-smoking friend and roommate who persuades him to share his pipe. Under the influence of the drug, both experience hallucinations, which physically materialize on stage. While the hero exteriorizes his soul/self, which appears in the shape of a young woman dressed in white, to tell her how much he hates and despises her for her purity, innocence and meekness, his friend calls up his dead mother from the other world to tell her how much he misses her. As soon as the hero kills himself and his soul/self walks away from his body in anger and disgust, realism gives way completely to fantasy. In a desperate attempt to bring the hero back to life, his eternally dazed friend seeks the assistance of a magician who offers him four alternative souls to choose from. The conjured up souls/selves are those of a brutal thug of enormous physical strength, a wily and sophisticated conman and big-time swindler, a smooth and oily playboy and inveterate ladies-seducer, and an old dancer and once famous courtesan. Though the friend rejects all of them, the dead hero is tempted by their promise of power, wealth and endless sexual gratification and allows them all to inhabit his body. Through them, he is able to chastise his former persecutors, win back the landlady's daughter and make a lot of money and this makes him very happy. But when he finds himself committing crimes against his will, beating people to death, making shady deals and seducing women, including his girlfriend and her mother, and ruining their lives, he becomes disgusted with his new 'selves' and longs for his old meek and innocent one. But it is too late; all his attempts to rebel, force the evil spirits out of his body and retrieve his old self fail and the conflict ends with his defeat and death. Such and end, however, does not befit a comedy; therefore, the final scene takes us back, in a full circle, as it were, to the beginning of the play and the scene in which the hero's friend discovers him lying, seemingly lifeless, on the floor. This time, however, the hero responds to his friend's efforts to revive him and wakes up to reveal to us that all we had seen was but a dream. Though it uses the simple formula of the cautionary morality play and resorts to the somewhat hackneyed dream-device to provide a happy ending, Lamma Roohi Til'et, more than any of the above-discussed plays, has the making of a decent play in terms of structure and provides plenty of scope for dark satire, black comedy, and even cruel farce. The verbal texture, however, displayed a sorry lack of skillful writing. At many points the author seemed to lose control of the mood, failing to deftly orchestrate the shifts from the serious to the comic, swinging erratically and disconcertingly between them, while the dialogue was often burdened with needless repetitions and redundancies, purely intended for comic effect, and suffered from an overabundance of clichés. It was precisely the quality of the writing, its crispness, freshness and austere economy, that guaranteed the success of , a musical comic revue presented by the Halwasa (Hallucination) independent theatre troupe at Rawabet on 11 and 12 June (and repeated on 13 and 14 July) as part of Al-Hanger centre's 3rd Independent Theatre Season, which started on 13 April and continues till 2 August. Based on a collection of short stories, Darb Batee' 'ala Tabl Saghir (Slow Beats on a Small Drum), by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Al-Rimawi -- particularly the 3 stories entitled A Spinster Does Not Think Like Everyone Else, A Box of Tobacco for Abdel-Hamid and Quick Developments -- as well as the actors' improvisations on them, El-Sirk Sirkina consisted of a series of brief sketches, presented as numbers in a circus tent, interspersed with songs, dances and the introductions and comments of a clown, who acts as master of ceremonies, and framed at the beginning and end by a musical prologue and epilogue. Dramaturge and director Hani Abdel-Nasser -- the founder of the group, who wrote the final script of this show, directed it and also composed the music of its opening and finale as well as playing the clown -- dressed the space at Rawabet in colourful drapes to look and feel like a circus tent and orchestrated the flow of the 'numbers' with subtlety and extreme sensitivity to mood, tone and tempo. The major sketches blended humour and pathos in equal measures and were at once poignant and hilarious. The humour, whether pensive, gently ironical, cynical or bleak, sprang mainly from the situation and the characters involved in it. No comic clichés here, verbal or physical, and no stereotypes, facile parody, conventional gimmicks, wordplay, or coarse jokes. In the first sketch, 'At the Cinema', based on A Spinster Does Not Think Like Everyone Else, an unmarried, working woman of 30 takes refuge in a cinema to escape for a while her dreary life, frustrations and the watchful eye of her mother. When the man next to her puts his arm on the back of her seat, her pent up longing for love bursts forth and she momentarily loses herself in a day dream only to discover, when she comes back to reality, that the man next to her has left, taking away with him her purse, with the whole of her monthly salary in it. When one laughs at the end of the sketch, it is not at her, but at the sad tricks life plays on all of us. This kind of sympathetic laughter is healing, but one rarely finds it these days. The brief 'Hypnotist' number that immediately follows is not merely there as a circus item, but serves as an explanatory footnote that metaphorically describes what happened to the woman at the cinema. In the 'Prison' sketch, inspired by A Box of Tobacco for Abdel-Hamid, the laughter becomes cynical and has a bitter taste. Behind bars, a prisoner, stripped to the waist and periodically chased round by a fierce-looking, bare-chested, whip-cracking man, looks like a caged lion being tamed and trained. He impatiently awaits his brother's visits since no other member of his family comes to see him. At the first visit, the brother brings him a whole box of cigarettes, telling him it was all he could offer due to his straitened means. In the next visit, he only brings a few loose cigarettes, repeating the same excuse. In the third, the gift dwindles to one cigarette. Though we laugh at this, we poignantly realize there will be no more visits. Henceforward, the prisoner will be completely alone with his jailer, and the truth of the saying that absence erodes even the strongest relationships hits us with new force. In the 'Garden' sketch, adapted from Quick Developments, two lonely, unmarried, middle-aged people sit on a bench in a public park. We gather from the conversation that though they enjoy each other's company and treasure their new friendship, they fear that society will not look kindly on it. As a solution, the man proposes marriage, a respectable social institution, to pacify society and protect their friendship. But as soon as he does that, the conversation abruptly stops, giving way to a monologue delivered by the woman in a business like tone and consisting of plans and practical arrangements. It is as if society, with its soulless language and impersonal interests has suddenly invaded the couple's privacy, wrecking their gentle relationship and tearing them apart. Unlike the 3 previous sketches, the final one, 'The Singer', was developed by Hani Abdel-Nasser from an idea provided by Hadi Saad. It is a funny, pathetic and heart-warming monologue delivered by an aged, once famous diva. Reduced to singing in a small circus, the frail, old lady, who is given to falling asleep while she talks, takes refuge in the past and nostalgically reminisces about the good, old days. That this beautiful sketch was performed by a male actor in drag (Hamada Shousha) without degenerating into farce, is a credit to Abdel-Nasser's power of empathy and his writing skills. His El-Sirk Sirkina was simply uplifting. I watched it in its second run, on 14 July, and it proved a timely and highly potent antidote to Ashraf Zaki's miserable and thoroughly depressing 'Week of Laughter'.
