Exploring an Arab Zone of Diverse Theatre Cultures
Thomas Irmer*
The Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CITEF). 1 to 8 September 2025 in Cairo, Egypt.
Before the festival’s Egyptian opening production The Triumph of Horus, there was a small tribute to Robert Wilson, who passed away at the end of July. What followed would probably have pleased him: hieroglyphs in the Temple of Edfu are set in motion by projection and lead a young Egyptologist on a journey through time into the mythical past. The falcon-headed Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, is embroiled in a battle with his adversary Seth, who appears in the form of a hippopotamus, in a struggle for divine order. This Horus story was deciphered lately by British hieroglyphics expert H.W. Fairman and published by him as a book in 1974. The Triumph of Horus has now been adapted into a modern stage play by Muhammad Samir al-Khatib and staged by Walid Aouni with the Modern Dance Theatre Company in the Grand Opera House. It is a bombastic spectacle with magnificent costumes and sophisticated lighting and video effects in the format of a colorful musical with the message that the ancient world and its central myths are suitable material for enchanting entertainment theatre, and the hosts opened the festival with this truly grand performance.
The flagship festival of the Arab world was founded in 1988 by the then Egyptian Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, and can now look back on an eventful history. At the time, an impressive 14 million Egyptian pounds were available for the launch; today, the Ministry of Culture spends around half a million Egyptian pounds (approximately 10,000 euros) on this prestigious project. The agenda, however, has remained the same: to present contemporary theatre from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, together with productions from Europe. The majority of the total budget of 350,000 US$ comes from sponsorship, partnerships and logistical support from various institutions in Cairo, where a dozen venues are spread across the city with its 20 million inhabitants and corresponding traffic. It is an unparalleled challenge that all participating theatres and guests admirably meet, whether they come from Italy or Saudi Arabia.
Another sticking point is the name of the festival, which is confusing, at least in a European context. This is because the vast majority of submissions, which are curated by a six-member committee, are not experimental in nature. Sameh Mahran, who has been president of the festival again since 2023, is well aware of this. During his first term at the helm of CIFET, he wanted to change the name to “contemporary theatre” in 2016, but the ministry was against it. It was also a difficult moment, because in the years following the Arab Spring, the festival could not take place at all and needed its established brand name to restart.
It is rare to have the opportunity to see several theatre productions from the Arabic-speaking world at once. Two-thirds of the productions shown came from these countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, whose theatre culture is largely unknown outside this region. A major problem was the regular lack of surtitles or simultaneous translations. For example, it was difficult to tell whether Ahmed Al-Ben Hamdha’s play The Collar (Fan Box Troupe, Saudi Arabia), about boring office work, was a shallow piece about the world of labour or whether it touched on existential themes under the huge clock that served as its stage set. The Tunisian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello would also have required a more detailed understanding of the text to appreciate the interesting idea of the author Bokhtir Douma, who wanted to tell the story of the surviving Desdemona from a contemporary perspective (by the Hammamet International Cultural Center).
The adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in the packed courtyard theatre of the Cairo Theatre Academy was a completely different case. Here, too, there were no surtitles, but the performance, directed by Emad Al-Alwani, was captivating from the very first minute and easily understandable in its means of expression. With only three actors, the version manages to tell the story of Raskolnikov and Sonya in front of a kind of wooden shed representing various locations. Ngham Saleh plays Sonya as an active young woman who supports the tormented Raskolnikov but ultimately does not follow him to Siberia. Abdullah Saad, with his huge head of curly hair, looks like an alternative student who may have been present at the large demonstrations in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. The predominantly young audience is electrified, and for the first and almost only time at this festival, there is a sense of a secret alliance of theatre enthusiasts forming with the performance on stage. The applause was not only enthusiastic, but above all grateful. The Cairo audience was also quick to give standing ovations for other performances.
The experimental element was undoubtedly to be found in Artémakar Productions’ (New York, Yerevan) adaptation of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine by Armenian-American director Arthur Makaryan. In this monologue play, author Ani Vardanyan uses parts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an introduction to the Hamlet Machine, which, however, as a collage of fragments in itself, has been so amputated that Müller’s lines from the first two parts seem more like an addition to Shakespeare’s. The ambition to portray an examination of those killed by Hamlet from the end in an inner monologue could not be brought to the stage, which was empty except for a simple table, by the impressively physical performance of Narek Baghdasaryan. This production also raised questions about the curatorial criteria of the festival, whose programming clearly seeks new forms of theatre, but also seems to make many compromises in terms of the quality and relevance of the invited artists. However, it was also clear that major geopolitical conflicts, especially in this region, were to be avoided as a theme, and only very general, vague wishes for peace and harmony or their restoration (a message of the opening production) were to be invoked.
Two examples from Italy and Romania illustrate how CITEF is actually bringing new forms into dialogue with the Arab theatre world. Caterina Mochi Sismondi’s variation on Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppelia is a prime example of the amalgamation of drama, dance and new circus as well as musical theatre. The producing Fondazione Cirko Vertigo, with several locations in Italy, is a training institution with high potential for new circus and artistic physical theatre. This hit the bullseye as a presentation of current trends in international theatre.
The multimedia one-woman performance by the Tony Bulandru Theatre in Târgoviște, entitled #notI, takes up Beckett’s fragmented monologue Not I to tell a story of abuse (though Beckett had expressly denied this background for the character). Actress Andrea Tanase is surrounded by imaging devices and screens that envelop the stream of consciousness of the woman remembering her youth in a Romania in upheaval like a tattered tapestry of images. Cassandra Topologeanu’s production, with three live technicians whose artistry allows the solitary Tanase to assert herself very well, certainly showed something of the future of the technologically enhanced monologue play, which would certainly also be interesting to see on other European stages.
At CIFET, it was a fine, small production, and one would have liked to know what the local audience saw and felt in it. But there are no post-performance discussions or artist talks at this festival. This would again be a question of translation. So, with thoughtful impressions, we return to the unchoreographed dance of people and vehicles in Cairo traffic.
*Thomas Irmer is the editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Theater der Zeit in Berlin, Germany, and has worked in various fields of international theatre, e.g. as a dramaturge for „spielzeit europa“ at Berliner Festspiele and a contributor to a number of journals in Europe and the U.S.
Copyright © 2025 Thomas Irmer
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
