Themes of revenge were heavily featured in the history and mythology of the Arab world. On Tuesday and Wednesday night at “La Jeune Creator (The Young Creators), the annual festival of Egyptian or Egyptian/French theater collaborations, the theme has rebounded in different incarnations.
Masr El Masraheya company’s “Variations on Folk Tale, staged Tuesday under the direction of Ahmed Alaa, tells the story of a newly married peasant couple. The set was ornamented with a large papier mâché spider on the ceiling, symbolic of the wrench in the play, the young groom’s jealous mother.
Festive at its start, the play featured exuberant wedding song and dance, performed beautifully by the large cast.
The play relies on relentless tension-building evidenced by the continual repetition of lines and scenes. “Her father, rest in peace used to always tell her … the mother squawks, recounting a fictitious young woman’s infidelity.
The mother is full of fantastical stories about a woman having an affair with the henna seller, a woman who dances flirtatiously with the men in her village, a woman who made love with another man while her husband was away. Each story is simultaneously enacted on stage by the same actress who plays the young bride.
The parallels become clear. The young man begins to lose focus, lashing out more and more irrationally at his unsuspecting wife. Symbolic gestures begin to accumulate; a mournful song sung by a male cast member on one end of the stage, beside the frozen image of the worried husband. A black witch calls out her ominous lines from a raised throne behind the mother.
The sum of the plot, of course, ends badly. The young man, driven to paranoid hysteria by the mother, kills his wife, in a scene choreographed with a combination of dance, false endings and suspense. The mother, under the witch and spider, reveals her cruelest nature in the end; “Why, you didn’t have to do all that. she utters. The young man collapses, weeping. A crescendo of dramatic music bursts forth.
“The Verge of the Road, performed Wednesday under the direction of Mohamed Al-Tarrouty, played on a rather contemporary theme. A car mechanic and his brother, a young journalist, converse in the mechanic’s shop.
Each is placed in different positions of the same crisis. A mountain is host to a dangerous curving road on which countless car accidents occur. The government has been neglectful and failed to intervene. The young journalist, quiet and poetic, devotes his efforts to an investigation. His brother, thick and lumbering, delivers his lines exclusively within the range of anger and rage. He capitalizes on the crisis by reusing the parts of the destroyed vehicles.
A graveyard lies on the left side of the stage, replete with three crosses that send their distorted shadows to the already black curtain. Both metaphorical and practical, we find the dangerous road has claimed many victims. The mechanic wheels in the road’s most recent body on a steel pushcart, the kind used for transporting crates. A new twist is revealed.
The man brought on stage, unconscious at first, proves to be no other than the governmental official responsible for the road’s oversight. The journalist, full of wonder, comes to discover that the official was not, as he would have thought, on his way to a meeting about the road, but rather on his way to visit his girlfriend.
The young official sports an immodest red shirt below his suit, open for three buttons revealing his chest. Throughout the course of the play, he becomes more lucid, eventually even regaining control of the arm rendered immobile in his accident. By the time he is ready to leave, he finds himself trapped in a surrealistic nightmare involving the disillusioned journalist and his brother, already on the edge of exploding.
The play is full of moments that fuse symbolism and realism, the poetic with the sensible. Long introspective monologues between the journalist and the official are juxtaposed with silent physical gestures of the mechanic on the other side of the stage. The official’s awakening of consciousness, evidenced by his proclamation to put signs on the road, does not convince the brothers. In the end, it is the journalist himself who pushes the knife.
The two plays boast themes of revenge as well as pertinent social and moral commentary in an Egyptian context. Unreasonable actions prove disastrous at their different ends; because of pettiness and unfounded jealously, the innocent woman must pay for a crime that is not hers. On the contrary, a good hearted journalist achieves (an imaginary) revenge on a criminally neglectful government.
Strong acting and dramatic performances dominate La Jeune Creator.
The festival concludes tomorrow 7 pm at the French Cultural Center, 1 Madraset El Hokouk El Frinseya St., Mounira, Cairo.
