The annual Egyptian National Theatre Festival has ended on the 16th of this month and out of the 45 plays on show during its 11 days one play in particular attracted the biggest number of critical reviews all of which have been very positive, this play is Qahwa Sada (i.e. black coffee).

In Egypt black coffee is strongly linked to mourning. After a funeral people who come to offer their condolences are given black coffee to drink, and it is to this tradition that the play refers. What the play mourns is everything that many Egyptians lament the disappearance of, from the lack of tightly knit families to the deterioration in the economy and the degeneration of pop culture.

So many positive reviews and so many friends of mine recommended Qahwa Sada that my expectations were very high and I became obsessed with the idea of attending the play. However, when I finally managed to see it (after an hour of standing in the ticket line and arguing with “organizers” who allowed late comers to enter at the front of the line) I was very disappointed by what I saw. Though the idea and execution of the play was, by Egyptian performed arts’ standards, above average, it was still mediocre by international standards.

The first thing that hit me once I was there is that the play is not really a play in the traditional sense, with a plot line and development in characters and story, but is rather a number of scenes strung together to give a sort of overview of the many flaws of today’s Egypt. Apart from the opening scene and the “fight for bread” scene the way these very familiar flaws are handled lacks originality or aesthetic subtlety.

During the hour and half of the play, audiences are shown one scene after the other in what is more like a checklist of almost everything that is wrong with Egypt: the degenerate pop culture that is spreading among the youth, the fear that the culture and Arabic dialect of Arabs of the gulf is taking over the media, the bigoted nature of Egyptian tycoons, the ugliness of the streets and buildings of today’s Cairo as compared to what Cairo was 50 years ago, favoritism in job application (known as Wasta in Egypt), absurd fatwas, the weakening of family ties, the dire poverty and marriage expenses that has led to girls becoming old maids and boys dying in the sea as they try to illegally enter Europe, and finally the loss of a sense of belonging and an awareness of one’s history .

The opening scene was by far the most original though a bit too nostalgic. In it the 21 actors slowly bury items from the days when Egypt was a prosperous country; pictures of political and social reformers, old actors and actresses, ads about iconic movies, in short items that symbolize the good old days. While this was a sad scene, the other original scene was very hilarious. In this “martial arts scene” as I like to call it the protagonist plays a mime scene in which he avenges the death of his friend by fighting with several men until he finally reaches the “boss” who give in and hands him what he wants: bread!

Of all the scenes of the play the poorest in taste, if not outright vulgar, was the “nursing fatwa scene”. In order to criticize the ridiculous wave of meaningless fatwas we have been bombarded with lately the cast used an absurd fatwa that was issued a while ago according to which the only way an unrelated adult female and male can be together alone in one room and not violate the Sharia rules is if the female nursed the male so that he would be her son (In Islam if a woman nurses a baby who is not her child several times, that child becomes according to the Sharia like a biological child to her and a sibling to her biological children). The fatwa was satirized by showing how male civil servants fought to get nursed by one female civil servant who was loathed by other female workers because she was preferred to all of them. The role of the female workers is played by men and the dialogue is very vulgar. And I found it very ironic that in a play that just a few minutes ago had severely criticized the degeneration of pop culture such a scene should follow.

The fact that there were so many people in the cast and each had no more than a ten minutes role did not allow for anyone to shine. In addition to that, the sound track, though mostly relevant, was so high I had to shut my ears or they would have burst and when I did that I could hear my heart pounding real hard from the vibrations of the speakers, needless to say I left the play with a big headache. However, this incredibly high soundtrack is just typical of such events in Egypt where, most probably due to the unbelievable high rates of noise pollution, it seems Egyptians are becoming less and less sensitive to high sounds.

In spite of all these flows why Egyptians loved the play so much to the extent that many saw it more than once says a lot about the dire situation of the performed arts in the country. Though it’s not great or brilliant getting the chance to see something well performed that deals with actual current events, rather than being poor remaking of old foreign drama texts does not happen very often in today’s Egyptian theatre.

Tags: eman morsi, theatre