Taxi

We discovered the book, Taxi by Khaled El Khamisi in Adam bookstore in the Grand Mall when we first moved to Cairo and loved it.  Reading it, we felt that we had a little peak at the life of real Egyptians in Cairo and that this was something we definitely wanted to find out more about and be a part of.  It inspired me to start my quest to read translated Arabic fiction, old and new, to gain insight into the culture of this amazing region.

So when a colleague mentioned to Scott on the bus that he was putting on an adaptation of the book we were really excited and didn’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing it.  As luck would have it the performances were on around the time of my birthday, so this made us double our resolve to go.  We booked Ella to come for the evening to babysit Leila and were excited to be going out downtown – something we’ve not done for a very long time (revolution, Leila etc altering our energy levels and social life!)

The staging was very interesting, as it was performed in a venue that is essentially a bar with a stage.  Just over half of the scenes took place on the stage, but actors mingled with the crowd and performed scenes on the bar itself and at the back of the room, so the audience was constantly looking for the next scene and moving around the space.  The piece was performed in short sketches, which is actually as the book was written; short anecdotes being told to taxi drivers, and there were a series of short intervals (to allow us time at the bar!), rather than a single long one.

We felt that some of the scenes ‘worked’ and that others didn’t work so well.  The style of the performance was quite melodramatic which we think was a directing decision to fill the performance space rather than an indication of the newly-formed nature of this theatre company (who was called ‘1000 tongues’ because all of their productions will be staged in both English and Arabic – pretty impressive!)

Overall though we enjoyed the show and were pleased that we got (out! And got) to see it. In a way, Taxi, will have book-ended our time here in Cairo…