War centre-stage

Nehad Selaiha finds war a recurring theme in this year's Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre

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Not unpredictably, and as has been the case for many years now, particularly since September 11, 2001, war, in a variety of forms and theatrical metaphors, was a dominant theme in this (the 20th) edition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET). Contrary to the prevalent misconception, still potent here and in other conservative parts of the Arab world, which traditionally associates experimental trends in the arts with an inveterate hostility to political engagement, an insensate indifference to social problems and a frivolous, decadent and self-indulgent pursuit of art for its own sake; the CIFET has manifested over the years an intense preoccupation with politics, in the multiple senses of the term, and a responsible attitude towards humanity on the part of young, experimental artists. Indeed, regardless of its subject matter or ideational content, and even when it seems politically innocuous, most experimental work in theatre has an innate revolutionary potential and often reveals a weird capacity for exposing and deconstructing the invisible political underpinnings of even the most mundane incidents and quotidian situations.

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Portrait of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish as a young man -- an adaptation of his Beirut memoir by the Palestinian Hakawati group was performed at this year's CIFET

Though the highly political 'issue' of 'the independent theatre movement in Egypt' (detailed in my last two articles on this page) has taken up so much of my time in this festival, with the result that I did not see as many of the shows on offer as I would have liked, or as I usually do every year, of the 40 or so I did manage to catch, at least 10 were directly concerned with the war theme and most of the rest dealt with various modes of political and social oppression. One expected, of course, that a show coming out of occupied, war- ravaged Iraq, or even created away from home, in some safe European haven, by expatriate Iraqi artists, would reflect the situation there; but the really reassuring surprise was that other artists, from as far-flung countries as the USA, Brazil and Spain, staged condemnations not only of this war and others, but also of the flagrant injustices and disastrous consequences of the rabid global policies pursued by the Bush administration, and in most cases did it with artistic sophistication, delightful theatricality and a mixture of black humour, poetry and grim realism.

The Iraqi National Acting Group's Taht El-Sifr (Sub Zero), written by Thabit Al-Laythi and directed and designed by Emad Mohamed, took its inspiration from the theatre of the Absurd, depicting a human situation as hopeless as that of Beckett's two clownish vagrants in Waiting for Godot and drawing on the same formula of the comic duo, with all its attendant comic and farcical conventions (a formula also successfully used in the Bahraini El-Sawari troupe's Suddenly, the Rain Didn't Fall. In Sub Zero, a young man (played by the lithe and versatile Yehia Ibrahim) escaping an explosion stumbles onto a deserted football pitch where an old man (the magnificent Abdel-Sattar Al-Basri) has taken refuge from the bombings, kidnappings and air raids. The rest of the action consists of the old man's hilarious, and often ingenious efforts to keep the young man from leaving, partly to protect the youth from the inferno outside, and partly that he may keep him company and alleviate his terrible loneliness.

The old man devises a series of games, as seemingly random and pointless as the ones Vladimir and Estragon play; but whereas Beckett's duo could delude themselves with the hope that the mysterious Godot they desperately await might turn up after all and save them, the two homeless Iraqi men have no such consolation. Rather than help them pass the time while they wait for some saviour, the games they play metaphorically emphasize the senseless, nightmarish reality they are doomed to in post-war, occupied Iraq. Moreover, this reality soon invades their safe haven in the form of an invisible American convoy and they are questioned and tortured time after time.

When the soldiers finally leave, it is near dawn; but just as the two men are about to relax, we hear the sound of an air raid overhead followed by a loud explosion which plunges the football pitch and whole stage in darkness. On the backdrop, elegiac video projections poignantly show the two men wandering happily through the streets of a peaceful Baghdad, visiting its famous sites and freedom monument and taking photos. When the lights come up again for a fleeting moment at the end, both are frozen in their places while a simulation of a snow shower gently drifts down to cover them and the whole scene. Sub Zero won the best scenography award and its two wonderful performers deservedly shared the award for best Actor.

The nightmare of post-war Iraq was also the subject of the Swedish Akito company's Escape to Nowhere. Written and directed by the brilliant expatriate Iraqi homme de theatre Talaat El-Samawe, it consisted of a series of horrific, quasi-surrealistic images of devastation, atrocities and mutilations. Equally harrowing, despite its hushed tone, narrative form, and austere visual simplicity, was Margo Lee Sherman's one-woman show What Do I Know About War ?

As an American, Sherman naturally projected her account of the horrors of the war on Iraq from the point of view of American individuals who were dragged into it and forced to play the aggressor, only to suffer an ugly death or irreparable psychological damage as a result. Based on first-hand accounts of American soldiers serving in Iraq, the letters some sent home, and interviews with the families of some who died there, Sherman's text of interwoven monologues projected the stories of 15 characters ranging from two deluded 19- year-old girls who excitedly leave home for the first time to serve in Iraq, thinking it an exciting adventure, and meet with horrible deaths (one of them has her face blown off), to a traumatized ex-marine who suffers from constant, unstoppable hiccups, to a professional soldier who experiences severe qualms of conscience after the revelations of the horrors committed by American soldiers in Abu Gharib prison and becomes a conscientious objector.

The notorious Abu Gharib prison with all the infamous and ghastly stories of torture associated with it surfaced again in the Spanish Theatro El-Mercado's Abu Gharib Fairy, written by Antonia Jimenez and directed by Paca Pinero. As in Sherman's play, Jimenez and Pinero take an unflinching look at the dehumanization of war, but here, they do it by focusing on the story of only one soldier who was involved in these heinous, inhuman acts.

Other anti-war pieces targeted other conflicts in other parts of the world. Both the Jordanian Modern Theatre Group's Black and White (written by Nawal Al-Alli and Majd Al-Qasas, who also directed and choreographed it) and the Palestinian Al-Hakawati's dramatization of Mahmoud Darwish's 1982 Beirut memoir A Memory for Forgetfulness (poignantly delivered as a monologue solo performance by Francois Abu Salem while standing between two bare, white walls stretching far back to form a tunnel, with piles of books scattered at his feet) focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in the Lebanon during the Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. Sudan's The Sudanese Lear (another interesting two-hander, written and directed by Rabi Yousuf Al-Hassan) cited the sectarian and ethnic bloody feuds tearing that country apart. And the Serbian Bitaf Theatre's My Homeland's Seven Dreams (written and directed by Nikita Milivojavic) used fragments of Greek tragedies to reflect on the war and religious and ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Other performances adopted a more sweeping attitude, denouncing war in general, without specific reference to any particular place or time. Both the Spanish Similacro Theatre's Weights on the Back (jointly written and directed by Aintra Uriarte and Aranta Iurre) and the Italian Story of Antigone (by the Mistral Company for Modern Dance, directed by Roberto Guicciardini) made beautiful and powerful statements in this respect. Unfortunately, however, the only Egyptian attempt at projecting on stage the devastating consequences of war and its dehumanizing effect on both aggressors and victims -- Al-Ghad Theatre's Dancing on the Rhythms of Death -- was too melodramatic and abrasively loud, and used far too much gratuitous physical movement to be convincing or ring true.