If You Stay Here You Must Not Think

by Dina Machmud & Mona Helmy
From: The Experimental. The English-language daily paper of 8th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theater. Cairo, 1996

“I was on the street and someone was standing here. I came to the same spot next day and there was a tree, a pink tree … the following day I came again…”

For the audience who fill the Al-Hanager Gallery last Thursday, these were the only words articulated in Ukraine’s Macbeth. The rest is silence, to quote another Shakespearean character. Yet “silence” is probably not the right word. Against a background of two TV-sets and three screen on which three films were projected simultaneously, three “actors” presented what is in all probability their very own idea of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

The first author set out to produce sound effects with a drum and a flute carrying out a crescendo every now and then. The second actor was responsible for the action using dolls – both small and big size, iron sticks and eggs. The third began wandering around, hands in pocket, sometimes approaching the audience to murmur something indefinite and then return to the “acting area”, hold a long, thick stick and strike it against the wall.

In an interview with the actor whose job was to provide the necessary aural background, he explained: “If you stay here, you must not think; only open your heart and soul. The performance will give you new ideas which will be conjured in your heart through the strikes of the stick on the floor.”

According to one of the performers, “what we did here is what you saw and what you think it is… Our purpose was essentially limitless; it is part of the everyday process that never ends for us. You can call it if you will a documentation of what goes on every day. We also tried to recapture the idea of Macbeth. We gave it a structure in which we introduce the possible idea of Macbeth. We tried to find what Shakespeare had in mind for the play, how it all started – all the characters of Shakespeare’s work of art are here… Maybe in you or in me!”

Some of the audience seems to have responded to this approach. For German architecture student Stephen Hriesshaber the performance was reminiscent of sitting on the bench while looking at a river. It thus gave rise of the feeling of being alone with something that could be only yours.

“The performance,” he said, “is what you make out of it in your mind, what you get from the three actors”.