What causes a people to rise up? Is it a simple trigger or a complex web of reasons? Where news reports prefer an easy cause-and-effect narrative, the reality is less straightforward.
That’s the thinking behind Ahmed El Attar’s bruising two-hander. His own production for Cairo’s Temple theatre company is a theatrical collage that gives an impressionistic account of the driving forces behind Egypt’s revolution of 2011. He uses a striking visual metaphor: dressed in white, actors Ramsi Lehner and Nanda Mohammad stand stock still for the play’s 40-minute duration, staring straight ahead with a look somewhere between caution and terror. They are well advised to be alarmed; around their feet is a bed of nails, leaving no room for divergence, no chance of stepping out of line. Charlie Aström’s lighting glows bright – then brighter still.
Exacerbating their discomfort is Hassan Khan’s punishing score, a percussive barrage of beats and blips with an unsettlingly wavering time signature. You don’t imagine there’d be much demand for a soundtrack CD.
Over this, Lehner and Mohammad race through a sequence of apparently unrelated passages. They give matter-of-fact accounts of terrorist atrocities, political assassinations and fatal accidents in the two decades before 2011. They run through the plots from soap operas broadcast during Ramadan involving pretty nurses and handsome pilots. There are scenes of domestic rows and workplace sexual abuse. We get football chants, religious prayers and jokes about President Mubarak, coming at the end like the release of air from a pressure cooker.
It is the accumulation of violence, cover-ups and oppression, the playwright seems to say, that makes people hunger for change and take to the streets.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August.
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