Egypt’s play ‘F**K Darwin’ will be shown within Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre on September 5 on Facebook

CAIRO - 4 September 2020: “F**K Darwin” or “How I Have Learned to Love Socialism”, a theatre play written and directed by Ahmed El Attar, is shown within the 27th edition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (2020), taking place between 1 and 11 September.

The show will be available for viewing on Saturday 5 September at 4 pm through the festival's official Facebook page and website: http://cifet.org

“F**K Darwin” or “How I Have Learned to Love Socialism” takes part in the CIFET’s Festival Memory, a new non-competitive segment which presents a total of nine remarkable Egyptian performances that participated in the festival's previous editions. 

The performances’ selection was done by a specialized committee headed by Mohamed Abdel Rahman El Shafei, and including also Mohamed Amin Abdel Samad and Amr Sharaf.

The play was produced by the Montenegrin National Theatre, the Kampnagle Theatre in Hamburg, and the Temple Independent Theatre Company (co-founded by El Attar in 1993) being the latter’s first production outside of its home country. 

It was staged during the 19th edition of the Montenegro Theatre festival  and at the Montenegro National Theatre where it run for a whole month.

“F**K Darwin” or “How I Have Learned to Love Socialism” stars a renowned Egyptian actor Sayed Ragab, who won the Best Actor award at the 21st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (2007).

The performance is the result of a creative process informed by improvisation and involving four actors from Montenegro, two actors from Egypt and the Temple company’s creative team from Egypt and Lebanon.

Aiming to reflect on the current ideological vacuum, cultural supremacy and ideological political struggle, the show uses excerpts from the famous Suez Canal Nationalization speech given by the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The play presents the complex relationships between members of a family trapped in time and space as they wait for dinner to be served.  The use of minimalist techniques in the acting, text, scenery and music serve to convey both the tension and absurdity of human interaction as framed by global politics. The minimalist theatrical method has also allowed the director to remove any non-essential elements from the work and focus only on the pivotal components.