Coming of age

The regional theatre clubs and free theatre movement marked their 12th anniversaries with festivals. Nehad Selaiha detects a sombre tone in the whirl
Imagine trying to cover two busy festivals, running simultaneously, and fitting in five shows a day, four of which are scheduled at the same time in two different venues. Throughout the whole of last week I attempted to accomplish this forbidding task, with the thoroughly disorienting result of having the avalanche of graphic impressions which inundated me each day merging willy-nilly in my head as I crawled into bed every night and forming the weirdest imaginable kind of surrealistic, nightmarish kaleidoscope.
The bald, neurotic young hero in Gamal Yaqoot's adaptation of Mario Fratti's 1963 Italian melodrama, The Cage -- translated for the Theatre Magazine in 1982, and recklessly performed with plenty of erotic abandon by Al-Anfoushi theatre club at the opening of the regional theatre clubs festival, at Al-Hanager, on 28 February -- haunted me every night, adamantly refusing to be confined to the space allotted him in either the Italian text or Egyptian production. Thoroughly disgusted with the world, he locks himself up in the play in a man-size bird cage (complete with toilet), pitched right in the middle of the family's living- room, within titillating sight of his brother's make- shift conjugal couch, and spends his time reading Chekov and entertaining sexual fantasies of his seductive, siren-like sister-in-law, who eventually seduces him into killing his brother then jilts him. The play leaves him, still in his cage, raving and venting his wrath upon the world. In my dreams, however, he managed to sneak out and merge with the deranged hero of Sa'd Mekkawi's The Art of Dying who, on the following night, sadistically dragged the hapless audience onto the Hanager stage and seated them in the most uncomfortable cramped positions, round a lugubrious, over-littered, tomb-like set.
The hero this time was a religious maniac and critic- loather -- a painter who begins his career with the murder of an art critic who did not like his paintings (a gruesome warning to all the critics present) and ends up, in exile, slaughtering an innocent, poor blacksmith, whom he had hired as a model, to make a life-like painting of Christ on the cross, with real human blood sprayed over the canvas. Sa'd Mekkawi's play (directed by Youssef El-Naqib and performed with grim seriousness and lots of candles -- more than any fire-safety regulations would allow in such a cramped space -- by Al-May theatre club) was not, however, without some kind of bizarre fascination. Squatting between two rough-edged benches, for lack of seats, in that stuffy, claustrophobic atmosphere, gazing at the corpse draped in a dirty sheet and stretched on a bier- like bed, fringed with candles, which formed the centre-piece of the set and ate up most of the performance space, I gradually began to feel dizzy, as if hypnotised by that religious maniac and his ritualistic killings.
The images presented in Carnival 2002, written and directed by Mohamed Abdel- Mu'ti and Osama Mahmoud, respectively, for the Beni Sueif Club, were equally nightmarish, with two fussy demonic dancers, plenty of spiders' webs sprawled everywhere, voluminous black shrouds, and skulls galore. The message, however, was overtly political and the overall conception embarrassingly simplistic. The doomed victim, a veiled girl, thickly swathed in layers of black and waving the obligatory-in-such-plays olive-branch was obviously Palestine, her Don Quixotic knight- in-shining-armour the all-too-conventional theatrical symbol of the Arab nations, while the vigorous, nimble, wily dancers who eventually kill her naturally signified Israel -- what else? The only intellectually valid and theatrically potent moment in this otherwise uniformly insipid and sentimental presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict was when the female victim, finally certain of her death, suddenly ripped off her veil and cast off her thick, black robes, revealing underneath a fighter's overall. This brave gesture may not have saved her life, but, at least, it pointed in the right direction, obliquely suggesting a deeper cause for her tragic fate and one of the major negative aspects of Arab culture -- namely the continued oppression and marginalisation of women.
The Qaraqoz, a political skit on contemporary Arab reality from the same Beni Sueif theatre club, performed by three clowns against a traditional street-puppet-show booth, with plenty of cross-dressing and slapstick farce, sported a similar daring moment which shocked many members of the audience, including some critics. The first half hour seemed to ramble with little promise of anything new or exciting; the gags and gambols were hackneyed and the humour generally sluggish. This went on until two of the clowns decided to perform a sketch called The Rape of Palestine. The one playing Israel dressed up as a thug; the other, representing Palestine, cross-dressed as a woman. They meet in the stereotypical alley of old Egyptian movies, and in the heat of the rape attempt, the villain gloatingly boasts to his victim that he was her father's murderer. In a fit of rage, she tries to take revenge. During the scuffle, suddenly the call for prayers peals out. This scene is familiar to the audience from countless corny Egyptian movies and whenever it occurs in the cinema, be sure the muezzin's voice will strike terror into the villain's heart, paralyzing his hand and miraculously preventing the crime. In the Qaraqoz, however, no such miracle transpired. The call for prayers here was not like anything you would normally hear from a minaret, or even on radio or television, but the mechanical, tinny, squeaky one lately made familiar by the avalanche of Ramadan lanterns imported from China which inundated the Egyptian market during the holy month. As soon as the canned prayer-call was heard, the action went into slow-motion and, to make matters worse, once it stopped, the "good" sinned-against heroine dropped dead on the spot, as if struck by a bolt from the blue. The message, that no appeal to heaven (particularly one issuing from an imported squeaking plastic toy for an over- commercialised religious month) could ever alone save Palestine, completely overturned audience expectations and proved too savagely ironical to easily swallow, even when washed down with a bucketful of laughter.
The sense of siege, of impotence, hopelessness and humiliation cropped up in many other shows in a wide range of moods and styles and with varying degrees of anger and rebelliousness. Marwa Farouk's The Body and Soul Sonata, from Menya, Zakariya Ahmed Hassan's A World of Glass, from Marsa Matrouh, Khaled Tawfiq's Blue Dreams, or Tomorrow I Shall Buy Wings, from Al-Nasr Club, Let's Come, from Al-Qabari Club, Al-Anfoushi Club's The End of the Wall (both from Alexandria), and Husam El-Ghamri's Irish Dogs, from Luxor -- all displayed defeated, beleaguered young men and women, from different walks of life, confined in cages, cells, to wheelchairs, or behind real or metaphorical walls and bars, constantly oppressed by the hereditary symbols of authority -- social, parental, political or religious -- and ardently longing for freedom and self-fulfillment. However, the most poignant, imaginatively inventive and artistically polished variation on this sad and depressing theme -- the real gem of this festival -- was another Anfushi Club production, called Sa'a fi-Albak (An Hour in Your Heart), collectively written by the four young performers and directed by the same Sherif Desouki who played the lead in The Cage.
The title, Sa'a fi-Albak, is an obvious ironical play on the name of a famous 1950's radio comedy show called Sa'a li-Albak (Happy Hour) which caricatured scenes from everyday life in short, hilarious sketches. In presenting us with an updated, more caustic version of this old comic show, was Desouki and his team implicitly trying to tell us that the gentle fun we enjoyed back then can no longer exist? That the follies and foibles of humanity have grown since far more tragic and more devastating? In a series of ebullient and devastatingly honest mini sketches, Desouki's four young actors (two men and two women in jeans and T shirts, using their real names) reviewed their lives from birth to adulthood in an attempt to discover the reasons behind their abiding sense of futility, powerlessness and oppression. Their giddying trip down memory lane reveals to us, in quick, successive flashes, that the real culprit is the authoritarian structure of our whole culture, manifested in all our institutions and even our most private and intimate relationships. The domination-subservience ethos, which governs our lives from birth till death, enshrines obedience as the highest value, the golden rule, the ultimate good, and, therefore, keeps reproducing the same ossified system and generation after generation of stunted, stultified creatures who are never allowed the chance to flower and fulfill their individual potentials. In scene after hilarious scene, we were shown how people are crippled from birth, denied any breathing space, drained of any initiative and transformed into automatons who only know how to follow orders.
The grimness of this pessimistic vision, however, was effectively countered by the energy and versatility of the young actors, their robust sense of humour, a spatter of lively songs and light tunes, and, above all, by the bright and colourful children's- picture-book visual style of the whole production. And to guard against tragedy ever breaking through the thin, sparkling coat of sugar-icing, the poignancy of the revelations was lyrically softened by intermittent film sequences showing the four young people walking into the sea, floating on its waves, gazing into the distance or at the sky above and wondering whether something better lay on some other distant shore.
While the annual contest of the regional theatre clubs was in full swing at Al- Hanager, on the other side of Al-Gala' bridge, at the Russian Cultural Centre in Al- Tahrir street, eight of the independent theatre troupes who, back in 1990, established what has since become known as the Free Theatre Movement, were busy cutting a tedious umbilical chord and making a concrete declaration of independence from the state by holding their first ever truly free theatre festival -- a festival (unlike the four they previously held between 1990 and 1994) completely organised, financed and run by themselves, without state interference of any kind, and, more to the point, without state censorship. Though dedicated to light comedy, it was, as you would expect, a highly political event. Whatever the kind or quality of the shows presented (and most of them were repeats which you could have already seen at Al- Hanager, like Schrapnel's Jacques and his Master; Wikalat El-Ghori, like the Light troupe's Fragments of Diamond; the French Cultural Centre, like The Caravan's The Diary of Fatma or The Hungry Dream of the Bread Market, or any other foreign or state- owned venue, or, at least read about them in reviews published on this page when they were first performed), they all clamoured for freedom (the absence of which the Sa'a fi-Albak Alexandrian team so sorely mourned) and tirelessly asserted their right to exist, express themselves freely and defend oppressed and marginalised sections of society.
As I toed and froed between Hanager and the Russian Cultural Centre, it suddenly struck me that both festivals had come into existence exactly 12 years ago. 1990, the year of the Gulf War, marked, ominously or auspiciously, the birth of both events. Early that year, I remember it was cold and drizzly, I boarded one of the notoriously rickety buses of the Mass Culture establishment (it hadn't yet been given the more chic title of 'cultural palaces') with a friendly crowd of theatre reviewers. It carried us to the coastal city of Damietta where the birth of the regional theatre clubs was announced with appropriate aplomb. The governor was there, and so was the then head of the Mass Culture organisation.
What I most vividly remember of that visit, though, are the cold drafts, issuing from mysterious sources or venting points (invaluable in summer, but deadly in winter), the bare, grimy tiles of what looked like long deserted halls, the tepid, thickly sugared, endless glasses of black tea and, curiously, a vague impression of a forest of poorly painted wooden poles and flats thinly camouflaged as sets. Practically whatever we saw seemed to fiercely clash with the pomp and circumstance of the official reception and the proclaimed intentions in the hype- filled official speeches. But what was heart- warming, even fitfully exhilarating, was an elusive sense of liberation -- an intense, rebellious longing for freedom that glimmered here and there, more often than not taking the form of a naïve, obstreperous flouting of all aesthetic rules. Were all those young people, I fatuously wondered then, looking for some kind of new aesthetic -- an aesthetic of ugliness?
The following year, in Ismailia, where the second festival was held, did not settle this question. Some of the performances we watched were garishly rebellious, nauseatingly honest, and definitely ugly in a fascinating, quite unforgettable sort of way. Others had so much subtlety and finesse you wouldn't connect them with the same cultural context. The daily bulletin of the current festival at Hanager has a documentary section. In its second issue, I found an Arabic translation of a review of the event I had written and published at the time on this page. In that old review, I defended the new aesthetic of ugliness, the untamed, anti-bourgeois shock tactics of a play called Talk Market which involved a plentiful display of dirt, savagery and brutal cruelty in a mix of apocalyptic prophecy and slice-of-life naturalism. The same review sported a photo of a lovely young woman, called Maysa El-Rifa'i in a production called The Right to Emotional Asylum. That picture stood in diametrical opposition to the filthy figures who littered the stage in Talk Market and dressed the sense of rebellion rampant in that festival in the colours of the rainbow. Waiting at the bus stop, in Azza Badr's/Mohamed El-Shafei's sad, comic script, Maysa had wrung our hearts with her humorously voiced sorrows and impossibly romantic longings.
Where is Maysa El-Rifa'i now? Still waiting at her metaphorical bus stop, dreaming of emotional asylum? Or married with a handful of kids and probably veiled? As I watched this year's festival, the 12th, which featured some lovely actresses in difficult and daring parts, plus the debut of a female dramatist from conservative Menya in Upper Egypt, I found myself pondering the question of continuity -- not the continuity of the festival (it shall probably go on as long as it is politically and propaganda-wise useful), but the possible life-span of the young artists who bear its burden. Regional theatre festivals -- clubs, or otherwise -- are notoriously tough and ruthless; they pick the best available talents for a one-time job, paying them nothing, then discard them without a thought. Most of those regional artists are supposed to be grateful for this once-in-a- lifetime-opportunity without hope of continuity or further development. Year after year, if you follow those festivals, the most abiding feeling is one of missing, of wondering where people you have loved and admired go.
Was it for this, to combat the once-flower-then- wither tacit policy of most state theatre organisations in Egypt, that the hordes of young theatre artists who met at the headquarters of the Actors Union in down- town Cairo, in the autumn of 1990, to press for the theatre festival the Ministry of Culture had cancelled on account of the war, insisted this year on holding their own "totally free" festival?
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