Al Sawari Theater in Bahrain Chooses Comprehensive Experimentation
Manama - Abbas Ahmed Al Hayek
Al Hayat 01/01/2004

The Bahraini theater group "Al Sawari" has been working experimentally since its establishment in 1991 to enrich the theatrical movement in Bahrain and the Gulf with experiments that strip away conventional theatrical norms, delving into experimentation and innovation. The members of "Al Sawari" strive, driven by their ambitions and passion for theater, to propel their theater towards achieving full cognitive and intellectual maturity to cultivate a cultured taste among the audience through their distinctive performances, which have participated in Arab and international festivals and received considerable attention. Director Abdullah Al Saadawi won the Best Director award for the play "The Gag" at the Cairo International Experimental Theater Festival in 1994, demonstrating his commitment to a visionary approach to theatrical texts.

It is essential to highlight their endeavor to transcend the Italian box as a performance space. Despite not having a dedicated theater hall where they could stage their productions and facing technical limitations, they creatively crafted new spaces for their experiments, driven by the theatrical requirements of the performance. Among the productions that ventured outside the conventional theater space were "Scorial," directed by Al Saadawi based on a text by Michel de Ghelderode, which was showcased at the Cairo Experimental Theater Festival in 1993, and "Candle Birth," written and directed by Youssef Hamdan, presented in an old courtyard. "The Mask," previously mentioned, based on a text by Alfonso Sastre, was performed at the group's headquarters, which resembled an ordinary home. Another notable production was "The Sacrifice," based on Salah Abdul Saboor's "The Tragedy of Hallaj," directed by Al Saadawi, performed at Arad Fort in Muharraq Island and in the historical Gouri Palace in Cairo. Additionally, the play "The Disaster" was staged at the entrance of the Exhibition Grounds as a parallel activity to the International Book Fair 2002. Furthermore, the plays "My Zealot Son" by the writer Haneef Qureshi and "The Executioner's Portrait" by the writer Ghalia Qabbani, both narrative plays, along with three other plays directed by Abdullah Al Saadawi, were produced, marking "Al Sawari's" departure from the Italian box as a performance space. The play "Love with a Chocolate Flavor," written by Al Saadawi and directed by Khaled Al Ruwaihi, who also contributed to the script, featured Hussein Al Aribi, Najib Jalal, and Lamiaa Al Shouikh, with scenography by Mahmoud Al Safar and Al Ruwaihi himself, presented at the theater's premises in a three-story building, with the performance taking place on the top floor. Another production, "It Took So Long," written by Walid Ikhlasawi and directed by Ibrahim Khalafan, featuring Mohammed Al Safar and Rania Ghazi, was performed in the backstage of Sheikh Abdulaziz School's theater in Adliya.

The performance space resembles a living room, a courtyard for dialogues or discussions among "Al Sawari" members about theater and life, transitioning from the experiments' tools to a theatrical space. Despite its relatively small size, it is transformed to accommodate the innovations of Al Ruwaihi and his departure from the classical structure of the Italian box. He reengineers the room and its details in a presentation that explores the concept of estrangement - the estrangement of things, especially the estrangement of the complex and deteriorating reality, and the estrangement of humans caught between the overall meaning of the universe and the concept of the world. The story of a loving couple and the alienation of their relationship, losing their sense of intimacy. In this performance, Al Ruwaihi relies on scenography as symbolic references conveyed through visual and auditory signals, which alongside spoken dialogues lay the groundwork for reception. The room - the performance space - blends with its details in the darkness of black covering the walls, ceilings, and even the floor, along with the pitch darkness. As spectators, we feel our way to the thirty matrixed audience chairs through a small flashlight that barely illuminates the features, immersing ourselves in the strangeness of the place and the coldness of the human relationships portrayed. The performance begins with a narrator in which Al Ruwaihi displaces the human body, replacing it with a computer, where we read the events through its magnified black screen rather than hearing them from an actor. This is a displacement of the conventional narrator on stage, who has become a redundant character albeit still needed, in addition to connecting events and scenes through the waiter's dialogue about the worm and the fish, from the Italian writer Stefano Benni, which initially seems incongruent with the course of the theatrical event and detached from it, but the relationship between the worm and the fish mirrors the changing relationship of the couple, and his dialogue frames this relationship.

Perhaps Al Ruwaihi's use of visual and auditory vocabulary, such as video to display some scenes to fill dialogue gaps, like the wedding scene, and animated images of the main actors in different positions, and the lighting game that complements the aesthetics of the presentation, along with the auditory aspect through the music of Nader Amir Al-Din and his performance, and the singing performance of Noor Al-Zayani, gave the presentation and the reconstructed space its aesthetic, and vocabulary that stimulated the sense of reception and encapsulated it in this space with all its details, and with the widened and narrowed viewing angles simultaneously, leaving questions in memory that resonate with the presentation's statement: "Has the world truly become a small village, or have we grown enough to see the entire world as small and insufficient?"

"IT TOOK SO LONG," another production by the "Al Sawari" group, narrates the horrors of war and the psychological setbacks it generates for humans, to the point of losing the desire for life, through an elderly couple living on the sixth floor of one of the buildings overlooking a square filled with bodies due to the war. A story detached from time and place, it is a story of human beings under the burden of war, any war.

The announcement of the presentation suggests that "Al Sawari" is returning to the activities of the Italian box (Sheikh Abdulaziz School Theater), but upon entering the hall, spectators only notice scaffolding and large blue covers, with no chairs for the audience. Minutes before the start of the performance, the director guides us to a door leading to the theater's backstage, which Khalafan transformed into a theatrical space, overturning the familiar reception equation, where the audience enters the theater space from the stage's depth but from behind, and the backstage becomes a space where the audience chairs, not exceeding thirty, are distributed, and the enclosed space with its mysterious atmosphere, crafted from old woods showing signs of wear and tear, symbolizing the deterioration of the human spirit under challenging circumstances. Objects cluttered together, symbolizing the chaos of war, candles distributed in the corners of the place. Through visual and auditory symbols - the sad contrabass music - sent by the performance, and through the actors' performances, varying between harmonious performance by Mohammed Al Safar and the stylized performance of Rania Ghazi, despite her well-known theatrical abilities, the audience sympathetically enters the turmoil of these two torn spirits. Despite surpassing the familiar in the presentation space, the décor, closer to the form of a hut, albeit consistent with the presentation's theme, comes across as contrived.