THEATRE-EGYPT: When Actors Skip Their Lines

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yasser Talaat

CAIRO, Oct 3 1995 (IPS) - Censors in Egypt are busy these days by the tendency of actors to depart from their (pre-censored) scripts.

The practice is one device being used by the artistic community to poke fun or make unsavory criticism of the Establishment – and escape the straight jacket imposed by having to dutiful render the original, approved scripts.

That has imposed on the Egyptian censor a compulsion to attend each and every theatrical performance, just to keep an eye on things.

Take the play, ‘Constitution … Our Masters’. Actor Ahmed Bedir puts on a mask resembling Egyptian President Housni Mubarak. Then he proceeds to invite people in the audience to make requests to the “president”.

In another scene, he states that two terms are enough for a president to be in office. (Mubarak is now in his third term as president.)

Enough is enough, said the Egyptian censorship board. It banned the play. The actors of ‘Constitution … Our Masters’ took a petition to the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni. But first they had to promise the board that they would remain faithful to the script and not improvise a word before it was allowed back on stage.

Director of the censorship board, Doury Sharaf El-Din, refutes criticisms that his banning of ‘Constitution … Our Masters’ was undemocratic.

“On the contrary, ‘Constitution … Our Masters’ was one of the first plays that I have read when I got my new position as a censorship manager. I was so enthusiastic about the play, hoping that it would be an example for serious political theatre in Egypt. So, I asked for some reforms.”

The script was modified, but once they hit the stage, the actors did not adhere to the reworded script.

” ‘Constitution … Our Masters’ criticised high-ranking officials in Egypt by name but this is not the reason of stopping it,” says Sharaf El-Din. “(But) democracy doesn’t mean the freedom to insult others. I don’t think that any Egyptian would accept the humilation of his symbols.”

“Getting out of the script is a main part of the actor’s creation process,” Madmoud El-Tokhy, the writer of ‘Constitution … Our Masters’, says. “The final result of a play is created for 50 percent by the actor and for 50 percent by the writer and director.” (MORE)

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