Even though the current reality of the Arab world is a painful and depressing one, it provides an excellent environment for artistic creativity; one of the few means available to tolerate the status quo, and a natural outlet for releasing all the suffering and bitterness of life. Thanks to war, oppression, pain, and the hardships of everyday life, artists in this miserable part of the world have a rich reservoir of raw material for inspiration. The desire to change current reality and the dissatisfaction with the present has always been the spark provoking the greatest art of all times.

I found this reasoning to be the only logical justification for the strong presence of the Arab experimental theater in this year's session of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater (CIFET).** With more than 20 shows from Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, in addition to several works from Egypt, the audience was exposed to a widely diverse Arab theater with many different forms and styles of expression. Although many of these works are considerably immature, direct, and almost naïve, some of the shows stood out, either due to the originality of the form and content, or due to the urgency and relevance of the issues being tackled. Three works that caught my attention were Sorry Sir, I Didn’t Mean It from Iraq , Fatima , a monodrama from Palestine , and They Are All Here from Lebanon , which, together with the Dutch show Bambie 8, was the winner of the official award for the best show in the festival.

Sorry Sir, I Didn't Mean It: Iraqi Theater and Resisting the Death Culture

The Iraqi play Sorry Sir, I Didn’t Mean It tells us the story of a teacher who, after spending forty years educating people, leaves his job so that he can answer an endless stream of questions fired at him by one of the students who, unintentionally, asked him about the meaning of freedom. After the students leave the classroom, the teacher realizes that he was not able to answer the question because he actually knows nothing about freedom—it is something that he has never experienced in his entire life. He starts wandering the streets and the markets observing people’s behavior, and then he decides to go back to the school to teach people from scratch.

The performance is a true and painful manifestation of the oppression Arabs, and particularly Iraqis, are experiencing in their everyday lives, and the absence of a true diversification, or ability to respect and understand any voice of opposition. The play takes the defeat from a general political level to a highly personal one that every spectator can easily relate to, and makes them realize their own internal defeat.

The Continuous Training Space Workshop is a theater group that was established in 1998, before the US occupation of Iraq . They rely mostly on field work and workshops in order to create a theater that is relevant to, and based on, reality. Dr. Haitham Abdel Razek, the director of the group, believes that Iraqi theater is an integral part of the resistance against occupation and the death culture prevalent in Iraq . In an interview with the daily publication of the festival, he said, “Working and creativity are the only states that make us capable of living, continuing, and resisting. The members of our group are trying to carry a candle that would light up in the dark.”

We all have to salute this attitude from the Iraqi group, especially when we know that the group works in a country where theater is completely nonexistent. “Because of the occupation, we do not have nightlife in Iraq , and thus we do not have theater.” said Dr. Haitham Abdel Razek. Although Iraq now has a serious and strong theater movement, the artists of this movement are unable to meet the audience. The trip to Cairo was itself a very exhausting and risky experience because of siege, war, death, hunger, the continuous bombings, and the absence of governmental support. The group got only US$600 from the government, to cover the costs of a trip that cost US$10,000. So all I can say is, “Hats off for the Continuous Training Space Workshop and to all Iraqi artists producing art under such terrible conditions.”

Fatima : A Palestinian Story of Anguish

While Sorry Sir, I Didn’t Mean It is a deep exploration into our selves, Fatima is a Palestinian monodrama based on the short story Fatima’s Dreams by Khalil Abdel Rabbu and directed by Dr. Awny Karroumy. Waiting for her brother to pick her up from her room in an asylum, where she has spent six months because of a nervous breakdown, Fatima stands to recall certain situations in her life.

When she was six years old, she left Palestine with her family, and settled as a refugee in a camp in Lebanon where she witnessed the civil war. She then escaped to Berlin to study and work as a doctor. It is a monodrama of a woman in the fourth decade of her life narrating the story of her dispersed people. During the show, we are exposed to different snapshots from her life, starting from when she was six years old up to this very moment.

Not only did the show present a story of a people that we all sympathize with, and a suffering unprecedented in the entire world history, but it is also one of high artistic quality. The director of the play managed to use all theatrical elements at his disposal, as well as different video shots and songs, in order to express the anguish and pain of the Palestinian Diaspora, and thus turned a story that most of us know by heart into a very interesting performance, with extremely captivating moments that remind the audience of the existence of such a horrible human condition.

They Are All Here: Standing Out From the Crowd

Very different from the two aforementioned shows, but still equally painful, is the Lebanese play They are All Here, the joint recipient of the festival’s award for the best show. Unlike most of the other Arab shows, which are of a highly realistic nature, this is a rather “polyphonic theatrical performance with a plastic taste, where time melts in space through a language charged with sensual impressions,” as the director of the play, Seham Nasser suggests in the program.

Rhetoric, voices, characters, and even the actor’s presence are all subjects of suspicion, resulting in different probabilities to the theme of the loneliness and estrangement of the human being in a difficult time. The influence of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist work on the technique in this play is quite evident; particularly Beckett's Endgame, whose famous starting line “It’s finished” is also the starting line of this play.

The play provides us with a mirror through which we can see ourselves trapped in the monotony of our lives. The repetition of the action, the absence of a vision or a goal, and the awkwardness of our relationships with ourselves and others, are all portrayed in the play through a series of incomplete and scattered actions. The play is the result of a workshop in the course of which the characters are developed and the script is co-created by the actors themselves, a trend that is growing all over the world.

*Mohammad Shawky is a graduating senior in the American University in Cairo majoring in business administration, but he is passionate about education and learning, social development, performing arts, and creative writing.

**The 16th Session of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater (CIFET) was held in Cairo from 20 to 30 September 2004 .