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Nights at the Foot of Eternity: The Cairo International Theater Festival
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12104 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
2,539 Words |
| Author
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John Elsom
John Elsom is a contributing editor to The World & I. |
The Fifth Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater will be hard to forget. It was a heady mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, brewed in such extreme proportions that it left its international jury, of which I was a member, gasping and giggling for a fortnight, like kids at a theme park. One venue was the Sound and Light Theater, a spectacular open-air platform in Giza at the foot of the Pyramids, which can be varously lit as a backdrop; but if there is one sight in the world guaranteed to put the avant-garde in its place, it is the Sphinx, which lay there stony- faced through a Platonic dialogue on erotic love from Romani a and a very long Antigone from Germany. Even WC. Fields would have preferred to play Philadelphia.
The festival took place in early September 1993, while the peace accord between the Israeli government and the PLO was being signed in Washington, and to all of us in Cairo, it felt as if history had turned another corner. Some companies that had been denouncing Israel and demanding an independent Palestine suddenly found that at least some of their prayers had been answered-a giant step for mankind, no doubt, but a kick in the pants for their scriptwriters.
Egypt, as the most pro-West and "liberal" of the Arab countries, could bask in a glow of selfsatisfaction. It had led the way. If Anwar Sadat had not made the historic trip to Israel in 1977 and signed a treaty with Begin, the process of reconciliation in the Middle East might never have begun, but Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists. The peace accord of 1993 might be held to have justified Sadat, but the threat from fundamentalists has not gone away. Some festival events were attended by cabinet ministers under strict security arrangements, which were stepped up after the Washington deal, but it felt out of keeping with the spirit of experimental theater to have bags searched for dangerous weapons and IDs scrutinized by hat-check girls.
Show Business
Sometimes the precautions seemed intended more for show than protection. The minister for culture had an enormous car, bulletproof no doubt, and even members of the jury were given large black Chevrolets with chauffeurs to whisk them from theater to theater. They were the kind of cars that intimidated cops and changed traffic lights, but they were about as useful in the narrow streets of Cairo as a Sherman tank in a supermarket; and since we always seemed to be squeezing between ancient monuments or backing into potholes, any terrorist could walk up, plant a bomb, and walk
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