Play it safe

In subsequent years, the festival guarded against such unwelcome surprises; video tapes of the guest productions were requested in advance and carefully scrutinised and vetted for any signs of nudity, homosexuality or profanity. Tights became compulsory and physical contact between performers was viewed with deep suspicion, leading the Egyptian member of the international jury one year to staunchly resist and block an award to a foreign show featuring two male prisoners in a work camp.

Egyptian shows are even more grimly censored. Mansour Mohamed's The Game, which opened the festival one year, is a case in point. Behind the back of the Egyptian selection committee, he had sneaked into the show a new scene in which a belly dancer tops a structure one side of which resembles Al-Ka'ba and the other an oil barrel. The consequences of this innocent escapade (intended as a dig against religious hypocrisy, not against Islam) were tragic for him: he was stopped from work, ferociously hounded by the press and accused of blasphemy. Six months later he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 32. A year later, Intisar Abdel-Fattah almost met with a similar fate when his Book of Exiles was misinterpreted by some as Zionist propaganda. As if Jews are the only exiles in the world! And last year, another young director, Hani Ghanem, came close to disaster over a scene in his Journey featuring two nude males rolling and completely covered in mud. He was ordered to provide them with linen underwear, and despite his compliance, the show was widely considered outrageous and drew vicious moral criticism.

Year after year, one keeps hoping that the festival will rid itself of the scourge of censorship which blots its reputation and damages its credibility.

Last week, however, I was given fresh proof that censorship is as active as ever. After weeks of vexatious shilly-shallying, the public censor's office has issued its verdict on Samih Mahran's The Boatman, in rehearsal for two months at Al-Salam Theatre: a truncated and bowdlerised version of the play will be allowed two performances only during the festival and banned afterwards in the interest of public morality.

The play, originally commissioned by the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Centre during a visit by the author to the US last year, centres on the metaphor of drowning and fuses the themes of sexual frustration and moral, political and social oppression. It boldly uncovers and ruthlessly anatomises the plight of millions of young people in Egypt today who are condemned by the combined forces of moral taboo and economic circumstance to eternal celibacy. After an eight-year romance, a young couple, desperate for a private place, take a boat on the Nile after bribing the policeman on patrol but the trip ends in tragedy with the girl's drowning and her lover's complete moral disintegration. The agent of tragedy is the boatman of the title (the policeman's brother): a sinister, hermaphroditic figure who claims, in the name of justice, the right to sleep with both of them in turn.

In a letter to the author, American critic Holly Hill, who served on the festival's international jury last year, described the play as both "delightful and poignant;... a work of art because, even in translation, the language has beauty and the play a metaphoric structure in the use of water". In another place, she calls it "a romantic farce, bearing in mind that farce is on the edge of tragedy". Both in Arabic and in Dina Amin's English translation, The Boatman comes across as pungently ironical and vigorously funny. Most of the wit and humour derive from the couple's painfully futile attempts to suppress their sexual drives by rehearsing every possible argument in favour of chastity and spiritual love. The arguments often clash, revealing the moral and ideological confusion of the couple, while the frequent eruption of earthy language into the absurdly highfalutin intellectual dialogue monitors their mounting sexual desire.

In the version to be seen at the festival, much of this plain earthy language will disappear: it was deemed too offensive and obscene. Another bone of contention was the bisexual identity of the boatman, and Mahran had to fight very hard to save it even at the cost of having the play performed only twice. "There wouldn't be a play otherwise," he says bitterly. In one of the gruelling sessions he underwent at the censor's office, he was told by one female assistant that she found the boatman's desire to have sex with a man abnormal, disgusting and absolutely unacceptable. In vain he tried to explain to her the mythological dimension of the character and the symbolic meaning of its behaviour. At the end of his tether, he suddenly asked her why she did not find the projected rape of the girl objectionable. That was natural sex at least, she smugly opined. When he finally gave up and walked out, declaring that he would change nothing and that they might as well ban the play, he was punished by this hypocritically ambivalent verdict -- a silly, costly ruse that fools no one and can only serve to further isolate the festival and the concept of experimentation from the general public, and consign it to a marginal place in the life of society, reducing it, like the old carnivals of the past, to a frivolous, escapist, self-indulgent seasonal activity, tolerated because it helps to stave off change and entrench the status quo.

The Boatman's two performances will prove the most expensive ever in the history of the Egyptian state-theatre -- both in terms of money and human effort. A production budget that runs into several tens of thousands of pounds (paid out of the tax-payers' money) and months of painstaking planning and hard work will be sacrificed to maintain the illusion that censorship does not meddle with the festival. The pundits at the censor's office had not of course bargained for this; they had naturally hoped that dawdling over giving a clear yes or no would automatically discourage the actors and disrupt the rehearsals and the production process -- which actually happened: rehearsals stopped, the actors melted away, the director found himself another play to present at the festival then went off to Italy, and work on the sets and costumes has not started yet. At the same time the censorial contingent could not dawdle forever. One of the laws governing the work of the censor's office clearly stipulates that applicants should be notified of the censor's decision within a month; otherwise, they could go ahead with the work and present it publicly after filing a legal complaint. In controversial cases, such as The Boatman, decisions are usually withheld until a couple of days before the end of the legally specified deadline, then the applicant is sent a short official note curtly stating that his or her work is still under consideration at least for a while. Unhappily for Mahran, the producer of The Boatman is the state-theatre organisation which is notoriously reluctant to fall foul of censors. He got precious little help from that quarter and has completely lost faith in it. Nevertheless, he is determined to put the show together in time for the festival, "to vex the censor, if nothing else," he says; after that the battle starts, he adds.

The case of The Boatman cuts clean across all the attractive slogans that surround the festival and discredits them. Taboos are ultimately enforced and freedom of thought and expression is severely restrained. And until such time as the festival squarely faces the question of censorship and honestly grapples with it, the title experimental will remain spuriously ornamental, limited to formalistic gimmicks and devices.

Most of the other Egyptian shows to be seen at the festival tread a fine line between outspokenness and what might be considered outrageous. However much they inveigh against taboos, they try -- in terms of language, movement, and costume -- to stay within the outer boundaries of what is proper and acceptable. A sentence like "I'll do anything to quench the fire between my thighs" in Khalid Galal's production of Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba (rechristened Galila's Daughters and hosted at Beit Al-Harrawi), or the sight of a girl peering in fear into the area between her legs in Intisar Abdel-Fattah's O, Supple Branch with a Golden Wreath are as far as any director can safely go without invoking the censor's wrath. This often results in a kind of acceptable erotic titillation -- acceptable because the object of desire is either almost always absent or safely abstracted into a symbolic presence. I wonder if this may be taken as a plausible explanation for the sudden proliferation of lonely and sexually frustrated female figures on the Egyptian stage. Eight of the ten productions ready for the festival so far are built around such figures.

In The House of Alba, the movement of the eight female characters revolves round a silent male figure, framed in an alcove in the wall of the courtyard behind a gauze curtain, which endows him with an iconic status. In Dina Amin's Illusion Circle (a triple bill of three short plays by Alfred Farag at Wikalit Al-Ghoury), one of the plays, The End of the Road, is a dramatic monologue delivered by a mad woman tied to a stake -- a woman who has been literally abused and battered out of her wits and ended up killing her husband. Catherine Hayes's searing Skirmishes at the Youssef Idris Hall in Al-Salam Theatre (translated and sensitively directed by Hanaa Abdel-Fattah, and superbly acted by Magda El-Khateeb, Lobna Mahmoud and Safaa El-Toukhi) presents three women in crisis, trying to cope and come to terms with loneliness, desertion, disillusionment, emotional deprivation, the ravages of time and death. The live music (piano, cello, clarinet), composed by Intisar Abdel-Fattah, together with the fascinatingly vivid reproduction of a typical sick room in the set make this production an unforgettable experience.

Music, dance and poetry is the material out of which both Intisar Abdel-Fattah (in his O, Supple Branch) and Maher Sabri (in his Women's Quarters) weave their images of women's hopes, fears and frustrations. I have not yet seen a complete rehearsal of Sabri's work, but the poems he composed for it are very graphic and deeply moving. Interestingly, the lead dancer in both shows is the same and she performs competently in both. This is not surprising since Sabri and Abdel-Fattah explore the same terrain.

Two more plays about women are Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (a Hanager production based on a novel by Bahaa Taher and directed by Nasser Abdel-Moneim who also directs The Boatman, by the way,) and Said Suliman's Variations on a Folk Tale (also adapted from a novel by Hassan Ahmed Hassan and produced by Al-Tali'a). By a curious coincidence, both are set in Upper Egypt and invest the characters with the same harsh ruggedness that characterises this region. Both also feature formidable women who assimilate the values and teachings of patriarchal society and ferociously enforce and sustain them. Taher's novel is far superior to Hassan's Variations; but I am still waiting to see a run-through of Aunt Safiyya to find out what Said Haggag, who adapted it for the stage, made of it.

But if you get tired of women, their dilemmas and ordeals -- as I do sometimes -- you can seek relief in Khaled Galal's colourful and exuberant Shakespeare, One, Two which I reviewed on this page two months age. A shortened and more condensed version of it (lasting one hour and 15 minutes instead of two hours) will play at Al-Tali'a during the festival. At El-Tali'a too, you can watch The Iguana, adapted from a novel in the style of magical realism by the Libyan novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni. But, personally, I would not advise it. It came across as a very silly and naive fable, devoid of any dramatic interest and, visually, it was all wrong and somewhat tawdry and vulgar. You would be much better off at the House of Zeinab Khatoun watching Hani Ghanem's The Madness of the Gods, and exciting performance art show built around audience participation.

Last minute shows invariably pop up in the remaining week before the festival. They are usually not worth noticing. But there may be surprises. Who knows? I shall keep you posted.