Egyptian theatre company adapts the 'dying medium' for social media age

The latest production by Kenoma, founded in 2018 by playwright and director Moustafa Khalil, is seeking to gain a new generation of audiences

Actors of the Kenoma Theatre Company during a performance of their theatrical tour, 'A Cycle of Attention', at the 3031 Arts Festival in Old Cairo. All photos: Kenoma Theatre Company

The third scene, 'Al Makhzan', of the four-part tour. The act is an adaptation of the Quentin Tarantino classic 'Reservoir Dogs'.

A scene called 'Art' addresses the subjectivity of artistic taste and the monetary value placed on it.

The first scene called 'For Her', which is an absurdist comedy that delves into how primitive two men can act when competing for one woman’s attention.

The actors act as tour guides taking the audience across the venue.

The four parts of 'A Cycle of Attention' are performed in four different locations on the premises.

A scene called 'Not I'.

While some may argue that theatre is a passe artistic medium, one that has been supplanted by television, film and social media content, a budding theatre company in Egypt is endeavouring to adapt it for the modern day’s reduced attention span.

Headed by prolific playwright and director Moustafa Khalil, Kenoma, an ancient Greek phrase which means cosmological void, is aiming to become a hub where artists working in different disciplines of theatre can hone their craft, share expertise and collaborate on productions.

The company presented its latest theatrical tour at the 3031 Arts Festival, which runs until Saturday at Old Cairo’s Darb 1718 cultural centre.

Titled A Cycle of Attention, the tour guides the audience to four different locations on the premises, one after another. At each location, a short scene is performed.

The tour guides are actors in the performances, each playing a distinctly different character, from the effervescent young man from Upper Egypt to the half-asleep hippy-dippy girl chanting loudly about love.

“I think I took it personally that theatre is kind of a dead medium in Egypt, which is why I started working on a format that Egyptian audiences might not have seen before, in the hopes that I could make the medium stand out,” Khalil tells The National, “What we wanted to do was show that theatre could evolve and find a place in today’s world.”

Though the four short scenes, which are written and performed in Arabic, are highly entertaining for different reasons — each presenting a unique subject matter that ranges from the precariousness of a love triangle to how the monetary value of an artwork is determined in today’s world — what truly sets them apart is the style in which they are presented.

The first of four scenes, titled For Her, is an absurdist comedy that delves into how primitive two men can act when competing for one woman’s attention, while the third scene, called Al Makhzan (or warehouse in Arabic), presents a revenge narrative that utilises a Tarantino-esque brand of bloody violence that made many in the audience look away in shock.

The name of the tour is a recognition that in today’s world, people’s attentions are fleeting and therefore need to be held in place by constant changes in the media they’re consuming.

Aside from how short the presented scenes are, the tour keeps the audience's attention engaged with the pastiche, over-the-top performances of the tour guides as they lead from one scene to the next.

“It’s definitely the age of short-form content. Just look at how popular TikTok is for instance,” says Myra Massoud, one of Khalil’s partners in Kenoma. “What we wanted to do was find a place for theatre in this new era. That being said, short form theatre isn’t an entirely new idea, theatricians as far back as Shakespeare’s era put on short scenes in marketplaces which were meant to be a form of quick entertainment that people could enjoy while out running their errands.”

A different scene

Kenoma’s productions are in stark contrast with the kinds of plays that Egyptians can catch at most local theatres.

Khalil explains that today only two kinds of plays succeed — the first being big budget musicals that lean heavily on ostentatious costumes and highly entertaining musical numbers, while the other kind are plays with a celebrity cast, which rely on their star power to sell tickets.

“In both of these cases, the writing and the art of the play suffers greatly,” he says.

Khalil, whose criticalness reminds one of an Annie Hall-era Woody Allen, is also an avid reader of some of theatre’s most prominent theorists, including Samuel Beckett, whose famed absurdism is only too apparent in For Her, which is presented as a dream scene.

“Beckett taught me that drama resides in the clash of two opposing forces,” explains Khalil. “After directing his magnum opus Waiting for Godot in 2016, I visited France and did the Beckett tour to understand where he lived and how he wrote. I even went to his grave at some point because of how obsessed I became with him.”

He says that the strong physicality present in some of the scenes is something he learnt from another of his favorite directors, Russian theatre legend Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose philosophy proposes that if the actor’s body is in the right place on the stage, their emotional state will follow suit.

Old inspirations, new format

One of Khalil’s main objectives was to ensure that his old inspirations found a place in the new format presented in the tour.

Having spent the past decade in the Egyptian theatre scene, Khalil explains that he was always quite reluctant to do what many other Egyptian theatre veterans around him had done, namely to tailor their material entirely to the audience and forget about the quality of what they are presenting.

“The audience is an important aspect of any performance art, but when it becomes the driving force of the work, then expression suffers, art suffers and we end up making the same play 100 times over with minor variations every time,” he says.

With that in mind, Khalil and his theatre company knew they had to change something to appeal to a larger audience, which would in turn help them accomplish their goal of keeping the theatrical arts alive.

“While many of our earlier productions were in English, we quickly realised that that had to change,” says Massoud. “It was easier for them to be in English because that was the language of the ideas we were trying to introduce into the scene here. But that made our productions a bit niche.”

She explains that using Arabic enabled Kenoma’s members to reach a wider audience and effectively address some of their grievances with the Cairo theatre scene, namely its lack of originality.

This was particularly true for Al Makhzan, which is an adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. “Egyptian cinema certainly utilises a lot of violence at times, so it was interesting to see how appealing the scene became to an Egyptian audience just by converting it from English to Arabic," Massoud says.

This month is a particularly important one for Kenoma, marking the launch of their March of Theatre event, which, aside from the ongoing tour, includes three other coming performances.

One is a play written and directed by Mary Aravanis called W Ba’dein or "What Now?" in Arabic, another is the full-length Arabic adaptation of Reservoir Dogs, from which the Al Makhzan scene was excerpted. Finally, Khalil plans to put on an Arabic-language adaptation of Waiting for Godot titled Fi Intizar Gadallah.