CAIRO - Only a week before the presidential run-off, the Artistic Creativity Centre in the Cairo Opera House launched a fortnight-long festival entitled ‘Ard Khas 1' (Premiere 1) for students who've just graduated as directors from the Centre, under the supervision of well-known director Essam Elsayed. During the festival, four short plays by four different directors, each lasting only ten minutes, are being performed each day. The plays are all linked together. The performances are ‘Tamtheel fi Tamtheel' (Acting in Acting) by Hani Abdel-Nasser; ‘Ors el-Dam' (The Wedding of Blood) by Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca; ‘Sayed el-Fearaan' (Rat Catching) by Peter Toreeny; and ‘Lailet el-Zefaf (The Wedding Night) by Tawfeeq el-Hakim. The performance can be described as a very rich, fatty artistic meal, as the actors strive to entertain their audience and take their minds of what might happen after the announcement of a new president. The daily performance starts with the actors in all four shows appearing on stage in their costumes, each standing under a spotlight and quoting one of the most prominent lines from his part. Then the fun starts, as the four directors pretend to come to blows, arguing over whose show should go on first and why. It only ends when they agree to start with Abdel-Nasser's show, ‘Acting in Acting', a musical about a conflict between two people. They argue about what to do or not do, whether to travel somewhere or stay at home, to act or not. They then decide to act and become famous. The two actors portray the inner conflict in each of us. Things move softly to the second play, Lorca's ‘Wedding of Blood', directed by Youssra el-Sharkawy. In her very short presentation before her ten-minute-play starts, Youssra prepares the audience for a totally different sort of Lorca. “Upper Egyptians and rural Spaniards have much in common, so I have decided to deal with this text in an untraditional way, making the text more appealing to an Egyptian audience," says Youssra, a 26-year-old journalist. “I have chosen to tackle this very tragic text in a totally different, comic way to make it acceptable to the audience," she adds. The story is about a bride whose ex-lover turns up again on her wedding night. They run away together and her groom, bent on revenge, goes looking for them. What makes the groom all the angrier is the fact that the lover's father killed his own father. ‘Wedding of Blood' stars Dina Mohsen, Hamdi el-Tayeh, Mona Tharwat and Ahmed Mohiey, all students in the Artistic Creativity Centre. They have all participated in an acting workshop supervised by Khaled Galal, a prominent director. After laughing continuously throughout this play, the audience can enjoy the third play, ‘Rat Catching', directed by Wessam Osama. This is an absurd play about the bad faces of any society and how people wear a lot of masks to cover their real faces, even if these masks only make them uglier. “I chose this text because it is very suitable for Egypt's current situation. Because it is absurd, this gives me vast scope to be creative, without being limited by time or place," says Wessam of her short presentation. The play is set on a rubbish dump full of rats, which are like the people who keep on pushing other people not to be their real selves, but to wear a lot of masks instead. A boy and girl get to know each other on the rubbish dump; they take off their masks and become very close. We move from the absurdity of Wessam's play to the classical text of el-Hakim's ‘The Wedding Night', directed by Marwa Radwan and starring Sherif Nabil Abbas and Riham Sami. Many years ago, this story was made into a movie starring legendary late actress Souad Hosni and Ahmed Mazhar. It's about a man and woman on their wedding night. The bride admits to the groom that she is in love with another man, so they agree that they'll get divorced in two months' time, pretending to her mother that her son-in-law is a very bad lad, so this is the only solution. Marwa tackles the text in a lighthearted way, full of music and dance. “The Centre will present ‘Premiere 2' as soon as ‘Premiere 1' finishes. There will be six plays, directed by six other students at the Centre," says Galal, who is also the manager of the Artistic Creativity Centre.
