Still quite giddy from a chaotic and gloriously surreal week at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre. Our first glimpses of Cairo were caught on a breakneck minibus ride from the airport to the Hotel (we were racing the van with the luggage – we won!) It was around 2 am and about as busy as London in mid afternoon. The vibrancy and heat were incredible and we started doubting whether our show was mad enough to suit the intense theatricality of this city.
We were put up in a surprisingly lavish hotel which featured an assortment of oddities – most notably a mechanical piano with a restricted repertoire of only Elton John ballads… Set about exploring the unfamiliar comforts of a five star hotel room (feeling somewhat fraudulent). Once the novelty of these unfamiliar luxuries had worn off we settled down to get a few hours of sleep.
First day was spent getting to grips with the festival organisation. The whole enterprise is really a staggering feat of coordination featuring approx eighty shows from forty-six different countries. In light of this knowing what is happening and where to be when is sometimes (put diplomatically) ‘quite difficult’. Fortunately since everybody was so genuinely welcoming and friendly the enthusiasm and dedication of our team outweighed the chaos. We finally found out the venue we were to perform in and were taken there – the Artistic Creativity Centre in the beautiful Opera House Complex in El Zamalek. We were blessed with a translator, Atef, who had the knack of keeping an incredible calm in the face of our outlandish requests (the sand we require for the show had not arrived at the venue, necessitating the technical crew to cart sack loads of it in for us). The other props and scenic elements (including the specially blown, 100 pound hour glass, which during the original production had been guarded by our ASM Steff with her life) were balanced (no, not tied) on top of the roof of a taxi which hurtled to El Zamalek weaving in and out of the tumultuous Cairo traffic at an insane speed.
The most lethal experience though was walking through the Cairo traffic. Why would you ever even attempt to be a pedestrian in that lawless, horn-honking chaos? I hear you ask. But our theatre was in walking distance from the hotel. Just over the bridge and across the motorway. That we all have the same number of limbs as when we left England is a miracle. Egyptian drivers have substituted moving the steering wheel and braking for just honking the horn wildly. Honk – here I am! Honk! F**k that was close! Honk – RUN!
We didn’t realise what an important event the festival is until turning up at the opening ceremony, with our backpacks and in sweaty clothes, finding ourselves amongst about two thousand guests in tuxedos and ball dresses, several national TV channels, newspaper journalists and photographers… We got politely ushered to the upper circle with everybody else who was inappropriately clothed, where no one could see us. The opera house was massive, a bit odd therefore that they chose a Georgian finger puppet show as the opening nights’ entertainment. How much of it we could actually see from the distance we were at, and how much we imagined, I don’t know, but it must have been good, ending up winning one of the festival prizes.
Our first performance was on the Sunday, and we were quite surprised by the phenomenal turnout. We had a full house, people sitting in the aisles and standing along the walls; we even had to turn people away! We had the most diverse audience anyone of us has ever performed for; festival participants from all over the world, Arab audience members both from different theatre companies and the festival administration, festival jury members and the general public; including several fully veiled Muslim women (who seemed very captivated by the production; interesting performing Müller’s feminist Ophelia speech in this context!).
Our second performance was equally packed, and amongst the audience was a national Egyptian TV crew making a news report on us! We’d like to get hold of that clip somehow… They only filmed the first twenty minutes before they left, but more or less the entire show has been caught on tape, or to be precise: On an Egyptian phone. A guy in the front row must have decided this was the most exciting thing he could possibly show his friends, and despite several reprimands from the ushers continuously filmed our entire show with his mobile. (Or he might have been making a bootleg DVD version of it – it’ll probably hit the streets shortly…)
To follow up on our former blog: Yes – the sand was from the Sahara. And Ophelia’s water? Disinfected, bottled chlorine-tasting water; from the Nile, of course!
We didn’t get to see that many other performances whilst we were down there, the schedule was to tight and our stay too short, but we did see the other Müller production which was on: An Italian company was doing Quartet. It was bloody amazing. Laboratorium Teatro from Rome really made Müller’s erotically problematic text come alive physically, with ingenious stage imagery, lines spat like machine gun fire and fervour like only the Italians can do it.
We met some fascinating other companies, including a group from Mauritius and an Iraqi Director/Performer we hope to collaborate with in the future…. We hope to perform in Egypt again soon!
- Øystein and Philip
