The Magic Mixture for Happiness

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In an ironic style, the playwright makes a carnival of diverse characters who all suffer from the lack of happiness. Every characters appears with its own specific monologue/experience, yet the same character re-emerges again later adding new layers to its tragedy and responding to the issues of the other characters. Almost in a bleak way, every character tries to live with its own lifelessness. In a society where everything seems to be fake, the human existence is void of humanness and of any hope in the future. Hope becomes a sarcastic bleak song delivered during the play. The magical mixture for happiness seems to be the mixture of those characters, who can only be happy by forcing it or faking it. It is a play that highlights the tragic situation of most of young Egyptians who cannot find a future to aspire to, nor hope. The depression of a potential driving force in Egypt, puts an end to the state-diffused illusion that everything here is perfect!

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In the Name of the Father

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An Egyptian billionaire seems to be ruling the world. He is the absolute Patriarch. His empire extends to his five children who control all the aspects of economic corruption on a global scale. From human trafficking/slavery, to prostitution, human organs’ trade, monuments’s trafficking, weapon trade, drugs, to the biological manufacturing of viruses and the pharmaceutical trade it entails, to the business of war, famine and investing in weapons of mass destruction, the Patriarch and his family have dehumanised everything. Following the death of his abandoned son (from a second wife), the father decides to repent by offering to the dead son his share in his fortune. All the five children rebel against the father. Led by the eldest, Hazem, the brothers and sisters gather to plan for the assassination of their father. The aunt (sister of the father) -who is blind- is the only one who dares to confront the father with his truth. The wife and mother of the dead son fight over whether he should be butties according to the Christian or Muslim traditions. The mother (ex-wife of the father) is christian, while the father is muslim. The wife of the dead son is also christian. A debate over which religion he should follow in death takes place. The mother insists that he is buried in the islamic cemeteries of his father’s family, to guarantee his inheritance as a muslim son. Meanwhile the five brothers and sisters play a deadly game that ends up by killing someone.

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Theatre of Crime

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A crowd of spectators gathers in front of the main gate of a state-owned theater venue in downtown Cairo. They are prohibited from entering. The corruption of the system has allowed other spectators in from the back door, privileged spectators. Hence creating borders between the inside and the outside. Those who are outside are marginalised, deprived, dehumanised and robbed of their dignity. One woman (Independent theater artist) is among that crowd. She endures a horrible sexual violation during the frantic attempt of the crowd to push through the gate. The theater employees refuse to help her or to let her in while she goes through a horrifying panic attack and goes almost breathless. She survives and later goes into a police interrogation where she is denied of her right to justice. The scenes go back and forth interweaving the events of the crime and the interrogation. The playwright fuses the fictional spectators and the real spectators who would be watching, creating a twist where the spectators would interact and create an end via a re-enactment of the crime and the possibility to change the events retrospectively, the potential performance space would counterpart the corrupt fictional state-owned theater.

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Hair

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The play Hair gives a panoramic view of hair as a political statement through the monologues of nine characters from different cultures, ethnicities, colours, ages and sexualities It aims to bring to light the objectification of women through the commercial use of hair, through the heritage of fairy tales which transfer the ownership of the female body and hair to the man, and by examining the voyeurism projected towards hair. It also employs irony in some monologues, movement and dance. In one of the nine monologues, Hair speaks for itself and reveals many taboos about itself. There we can easily see Hair as a symbol of the unspoken oppression and dehumanization imposed on women and people of color. Another monologue is the voice of pubic hair, where we can also confront a tradition of patriarchy that enslaves, mutes, and infantilizes female sexuality.

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Drowning in Cairo

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Drowning in Cairo follows the lives of three Egyptian gay men from different walks of life, whose fate forces them together time and again over a 20 year period. The play is set between 1997 and 2017 as Moody, Khalid and Taha age from 13 to 33 and the political system and queer life transform around them. In eleven episodic scenes, Drowning in Cairo chronicles the contemporary history of the queer community’s relationship to the law and public space in Egypt.

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Hearing

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The play depicts the story of three female students at the University of Tehran living in the university dormitory that is disciplined and monitored under the strict surveillance of dormitory officials. Two of the girls hear some male voices and start searching for the source of these voices while being interrogated by the dormitory authorities. The girls’ quest is in line with an engaging and intimate journey of remembering and confessing. Through recollecting figments of memories and their alternation with verbal, visual and aural expressions in the present, the line between reality and fiction blurs. The girls with their over-head cameras enter a Kafkaesque journey to discover the truth. At the core of this journey lies the enigmatic mediatized dramaturgy of interweaving verbalism and imagism. During eighty performances, it attracted 10-12 thousand spectators. Hearing is the first Iranian play invited to Festival d’Avignon (2016).

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