22 Plays Lined Up for Janadriya Festival

Arab News, Saudi Arabia -

A scene from the play “The Other Door” staged at Saudi Cultural Days festival in Tunisia six months ago.

JEDDAH, 24 February 2006 — As it turns out, this year’s Janadriya Festival did not confine its activities solely to handicrafts and camel racing.

Among the 22 plays displaying at the 21st Janadriya Festival is “The Other Door,” courtesy of Jeddah’s own Saudi Arabian Society of Arts and Culture. The play will be staged today at 8:30 p.m. to a men-only audience at the Third Vocational Training Institute, located in Riyadh’s Al-Rayan district.

This play skillfully depicts the lives of three prisoners. Just like Cincinnatus in Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” and Joseph K in Kafka’s unfinished novel “The Trial”, the convicts in “The Other Door” have no idea why they’re imprisoned.

Most of the three-act play entails the prisoners mulling their lost hopes and broken souls as they decay in a jail cell. The only other character is a prison guard, symbolizing the outside world, who ignores their calls and hysterical screams. Nothing but silence is heard outside the prison.

The Iraqi playwright Amir Al-Hasnawi wrote “The Other Door” and this production was directed by the Saudi actor Othman Fallatah. This production was chosen by the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Communication to represent Saudi Arabian drama at Saudi Cultural Days festival in Tunisia six months ago. The production also participated in a number of other festivals abroad. The Society of Arts and Culture presented “The Other Door” at the Damascus Twelfth International Theater Festival and the Cairo Experimental Theatrical Festival. It was shown on the Saudi TV Channel in October. The success of this play and the easing up by the Saudi authorities by allowing dramatists and playwrights broader parameter augurs well for Saudi drama.

As the Saudi cultural scene has developed considerably in recent years, the Janadriya Festival has widened its activities not only to plays but also to poetry readings and visual art exhibits.

Mohammad Al-Mansour from the drama committee at the festival told Arab News that for the first time the festival featured six plays for children.

“Children just loved the plays,” he said. “The auditorium will be filled with them an hour before the show starts.”

All of the plays are competing with one another in four award categories: Best theatrical performance, best director, best script and best actor. Women were excluded from even the children’s plays, but Al-Mansour said that lots of mothers did ask to attend the children’s plays with their children. He said they would consider that for next year’s festival.