Still harping on war
Nehad Selaiha winds up her report on this year's CIFET with a description of three more shows that she found significant
As I mentioned last week, Hammam Baghdadi (Bath of Baghdad), by expatriate Iraqi playwright/director Jawad Al-Assadi, stood out in this year's Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. Though the work is thoroughly, topically Iraqi -- in theme, characters, setting and referential framework -- it ironically represented Syria rather than Iraq in the contest. Nevertheless, Al-Assadi, whose heart is always in Baghdad though he lives elsewhere, as he often says, was forcefully present in the work that did represent his country -- a production of one of his plays, Nisaa' fil Harb (Women in Wartimes), by the Iraqi National Theatre Company, directed by Kazim Al-Nassar. Featuring three Iraqi women displaced by war and terror and seeking refuge elsewhere -- an aged, pathetically fragile actress (poignantly rendered in a nervous manner by veteran actress Azadohi Samuel), a robust, ebullient young woman thirsty for life (Bushra Ismail) and an introverted, religious woman with secret passionate longings (Zahra Bidn) -- it shows them anxiously waiting in a shabby camp for asylum-seekers on the borders of Germany and repeatedly suffering the harsh investigations of a coldly forbidding immigration officer.
The tension of the waiting visibly mounts with every visit from the officer (mechanically played by Basil Shabib) and finds an outlet in fractious bickering, which gradually develops into violent squabbles and ruthless mutual mental laceration. Punctuating this turbulent course, however, are moments of genuine tenderness and profound sympathy. Whether they are lashing at each other, remembering the good old days back home, reliving the nightmare of their harrowing escape, carefully rehearsing what they should and should not say to the officer or frantically worrying about the future, the women display a genuine concern for each other and a sense of a shared destiny. The play ends with the arbitrary decision of the authorities to accept only one woman and reject the others, and the sheer senselessness and haphazardness of this decision underlines the absurdity of the world the three women inhabit. Ironically too, judging by the behaviour and attitude of the immigration officer and the many humiliations the women recount, the future of the accepted woman seems as bleak and uncertain at that of her rejected companions.
While Al-Assadi's play focussed on the plight of Iraqi female immigrants in today's Europe, the Austrian Underground, by the prestigious Theater Tanto troupe, staged by Susanna Tabaka Pillhofer who also performed in it (together with Jan Tabaka, Anne Frutel and Anne Wiederhold) and undertook the musical direction as well, took the Tokyo Sarin gas attack as a starting point to investigate the reasons behind the spread of terror, the rise of fundamentalism and the proliferation of esoteric religious sects and communities. On Monday, 20 March, 1995, during the morning rush hour, five members of AUM (an autonomous, self-sufficient religious community), established in 1987 in Kamikuishiki, at the foot of Mount Fuji, by nature-cure practitioner Chizuo Matsumoto, who later called himself Shoko Asahara), placed a number of vacuum-sealed plastic bags containing the nerve-gas Sarin in five different Tokyo Subway units, puncturing the bags with their umbrellas and releasing the liquid Sarin before they left. The poisonous vapours spread through 15 subway stations, killing 12 people and injuring 5,500, many of them lethally. Like many terrorists nowadays, the five people who perpetrated this crime were all graduates from Japanese elite universities, scientists and members of the upper echelon of AUM.
In looking for an explanation to such insane acts, the Tanto artists trace them to the way we live nowadays, to the condition and mental state of people in today's overcrowded cities, and lay the blame squarely on capitalism -- an ideology "that was supposed to have cured the sorrow, pain and unrest, once answered to by the so called religions," in the words of Walter Benjamin which the play's programme quotes. Drawing on the musical scores of a beautiful collection of old songs, some of them dating back to the 16th century -- including Maurice Ravel's Nicolette, Antonio Scardello's Buongiorno Madonna, John Hindle's Queen of the silver bow, Luca Marenzio's Occhi dolci e soavi, John Dowland's What if I never speed, John Hilton's You lovers that have loves a stray, and Giles Farnaby's Construe my meaning -- as well as various published interviews with the victims and their attackers, Underground develops through live polyphonic songs, live instrumental music and an original, delightfully inventive and highly taxing choreography of body movement. The verbal text is minimal and is taken from an interview with a young woman who lost her husband in the attack. This sad story is sensitively threaded into the performance like a leitmotif which constantly reminds us of the reality of terror and the terrible human sorrow it carries with it. Like all the creations of Theatre Tanto, this enchanting, complex musical/physical theatre-piece is rooted in the spirit of music and comes across as an emotionally stirring, spiritually uplifting poetical composition. The fact that Underground also defies all known definitions of theatre makes it all the more fascinating.
Croatia's Odyssey 2001, a production of the GUSTL theatre workshop, conceived and staged by Damir Saban, the artistic director of the troupe, was another thrilling anti-war piece. Drawing on the recent Balkan wars and Homer's Odyssey, it looked for metaphors of contemporary conflicts in the ancient epic, establishing parallels between wars, old and new, and displaying through Odysseus, as the prototype of the returning warrior, the often tragic mental disfigurement and post-war psychological syndrome suffered by many soldiers when the action is over. Performed in the open air theatre at the Cairo Opera House, against a screen projecting video images of contemporary events and political figures, including Bush in the role of the new deus ex machina who dominates the contemporary Olympus we call "the new world order", the play's satirical message came across quite vividly, with a lot of delicious humour. The stage-design was refreshingly simple and surprisingly versatile: it consisted of a lot of iron oil barrels on wheels which could be deployed and manipulated in different ways to represent different settings and props. When the actors jumped inside them and rolled around shooting mock rockets, they represented tanks, armoured vehicles and war planes; when fitted with large white sheets, they became old ships and, when scattered, a group of islands. They even managed in one scene to recreate an approximation of the legendary Trojan horse. With only four actors, three men and a woman, and a chorus of musicians, Odyssey 2001 moved lightly, blithely between the past and present, the old world and the new, condemning all wars, in all times, on the way and, in the process, showering the war-mongering Mr Bush and his new world order with many witty barbs. People loved it, and laughed a lot, even though they didn't understand a word of what was said. For many, it was a healthy, cathartic experience and a true imaginative tour de force.
Recommend
Comment
Printer-friendly
