It was Tuesday evening, 23 June, when I arrived at Cairo Opera House Small Hall, minutes before the curtain rose. I managed to find one of the last unreserved spots among its nearly 360 occupied seats. The atmosphere felt instantly familiar, recalling student theatre competitions, graduation projects and short film screenings, where the audience is often made up of parents, friends and fellow artists, ready to break into applause, cheers and whistles, the moment a familiar face steps onto the stage. Although I did not recognise a single face, neither in the audience nor on stage, before too long I couldn’t resist clapping along with everyone else at the performance’s many interesting moments.
The characters in Metro Girl moved smoothly across the stage as screens shifted between past and present, blending humour and drama with frequent jumps in time. This was the first production to come out of the Egyptian National Theatre Festival’s training workshops. Every actor, director, scenographer, lighting and set designer involved had taken part in one of the festival’s workshops over the past three rounds, while the script had previously won one of the festival’s playwriting awards.
The event reflected a broader direction introduced when actor Mohamed Riyad became president of the festival three years ago. Best known as one of Egyptian television’s stars through the 1990s and 2000s, Riyad has spent his tenure trying to expand the festival beyond its familiar role as an annual competition. Training workshops, activities outside Cairo and a growing programme of extracurricular events have all been central to his vision.
According to Riyad, Metro Girl is not a production in the conventional sense. Producing theatre, he says, requires budgets the festival doesn’t have. Instead, he describes the work as a practical graduation project that brings together two of the festival’s initiatives: its playwriting competition and its training workshops. The aim was to give the playwright and workshop participants an opportunity to see their work realised before an audience. “Becoming a production institution is not the festival’s role,” he said. “Its role is to support young theatre-makers and give them the chance to apply what they have learned.”
The production was developed in cooperation with the Cultural Development Fund, with logistical support from different sectors of the Ministry of Culture. The Cairo Opera House’s Small Hall hosted the premiere, the sets were built in the ministry’s workshops, while poet Abdalla Hassan and composer Sherif Hamdan contributed the songs as a gift. Riyad describes the project as a collective effort aimed at supporting a new generation of theatre-makers. Following its premiere, Metro Girl is expected to continue at the Cairo Opera House, the Academy of Arts and as part of the festival programme in Mansoura, reflecting the festival’s growing activities inside and outside Cairo.
But the performance feels more polished than one might expect from a workshop production. The production cast and crew worked together under the guidance of experienced professionals, Riyad concurs. The project needed a major theatre director to supervise the experience, which is why Mohsen Rizk was chosen, while veteran actor Ezzat Zein played the lead.
Spanning the 16th to the 18th rounds, according to Riyad, the workshops have attracted no fewer than 15,000 applicants in the past three years alone. Auditions can last up to 15 days in order to meet every applicant before making the final selections. Training is delivered by leading academics from the Higher Institute of Theatrical Arts alongside established theatre practitioners, exposing participants to a wide range of methods and approaches. “We try to combine academic knowledge with practical experience,” Riyad says. “This is part of the Ministry of Culture’s role, and we carry it out through the Egyptian National Theatre Festival.”
Metro Girl is not the only recent project built around a prize-winning script. Earlier in the same month, the festival presented The Second Half of the Road, a staged reading based on another winning text from its playwriting competition, also involving participants from the workshops. Together, the two projects suggest that the training programmes introduced after Riyad became festival president in 2022 are bearing fruit. Riyad says the idea has guided him since his first round: to develop the Egyptian National Theatre Festival from a short annual competition into what he calls “a theatrical state” active throughout the year: “I wanted the festival to go into the streets, to become part of people’s lives rather than remain limited to theatre professionals.”
In his view, the festival should not be confined to its 15-day schedule but become a major cultural event that audiences anticipate. At the same time, he stresses that he built on what already existed, continuing the work of previous administrations which had established the competitions, workshops and structure. Since he came on board, the workshops have expanded in both depth and duration, beginning months before the festival itself. They are now accompanied by lectures, panel discussions, masterclasses and a growing programme of activities designed to keep the festival active beyond its actual duration.
For Riyad, the performances are only one part of the experience. Equally important are the opportunities they create for audiences to discover theatre from different angles. “Some people enter a theatre for the first time through the festival,” he says. “They discover this magical world not only by watching performances, but by getting closer to it through all the other activities surrounding them.” For Riyad, people return to the stage when they feel invited into the world of theatre, not merely seated in front of it. The same idea lies behind taking the festival beyond Cairo. “Our dream is to bring theatre back to people, and to bring people back to theatre,” he says.
By expanding the workshops and giving graduates the opportunity to perform in a major production, the festival has attracted people who might never otherwise have attended the theatre. But Riyad believes that from that moment on, many of them may join the regular audience. For him, building new audiences begins with building new artists. The young people who join the workshops bring along families, friends and communities. After months of free training with some of Egypt’s leading theatre practitioners, they find themselves presenting their first professional work on one of the country’s most prestigious stages, performing to a full audience, in a production mounted with considerable care. Riyad believes such experiences stay with young artists long after the curtain falls. They remember taking their first real step with that level of attention. It also helps explain how the festival has continued to expand despite limited resources. Riyad repeatedly returns to the people behind the event: artists, instructors, organisers and theatre professionals who believe in what they are doing despite modest financial rewards. “Theatre has never rewarded its people financially in proportion to the effort they make,” he says. “But those who truly love theatre never stop loving it.”
It’s the love that shaped Riyad’s own beginnings. When he entered the profession in the late 1990s, theatrical activity in Egypt was still strong. Alexandria alone, he recalls, had around 15 productions running at the same time. Across Egypt, there were no fewer than 120 ticketed productions every year between state theatres and the private sector. Those figures did not even include university theatres, amateur groups, cultural palaces or independent companies. “Theatre was one of the things that distinguished Egypt,” he says. Over time, however, the relationship between the audience and the theatre changed. One reason for this, he believes, was that many people gradually came to associate theatre almost exclusively with comedy. The private sector produced some important and popular comedies, he adds, but the success of that model led many to imagine that theatre meant a cabaret-type performance centred on laughter and nothing else. Even so, Riyad believes audiences are beginning to return to the stage in all its glory.
He does not expect that return to look like the past. Contemporary productions already point in a different direction. “A new form will impose itself, and it will have its own appeal for today’s audience,” he says. For Riyad, the festival’s revival of staged readings is one example of that search for new forms. Earlier in June, the festival presented The Second Half of the Road, which was warmly received, and he sees the experience as part of the same experiment as Metro Girl. “We want the festival to become a laboratory for our relationship with audiences, artists and young people,” he says.
The staged-reading format itself is not new. What interested Riyad was adapting it to the contemporary audience by adding theatrical elements that make the experience more enjoyable without changing its essence, relying on theatre’s three essential elements: the text, the actor and the director. It is simple and inexpensive, but it can still be exciting. “People came out saying they had forgotten the actors were reading from scripts. The performances, together with Ayman Abdel-Rahman’s directorial choices, made them feel they had watched a full-scale production.” For Riyad, the format’s greatest strength lies in its accessibility. It can be performed almost anywhere. He imagines Shakespeare being performed inside companies where employees may never have encountered his work before, or poetic theatre reaching clubs and professional syndicates. This, he believes, is how theatrical culture can spread without the obstacle of cost.
Technology has made culture more accessible than ever, he adds. Today, a mobile phone can take someone inside a museum they may never have a chance to visit physically. The challenge is no longer access alone, but guidance. “Everything is available,” he says. “What people need is someone to guide them to it.” For Riyad, however, expanding access is not only about creating more activities, but also about where those activities take place. Taking the festival to the governorates is equally important. For him, this is also a matter of cultural equity. “This cultural product belongs to every Egyptian,” he says. “It should not be exclusively available to people who live in the capital.” Distance, Riyad says, prevents many young people in the provinces from benefiting from its activities. Over the past three rounds, the festival has expanded beyond the capital to Alexandria, Tanta, Port Said and the governorates in Upper Egypt. This year, rather than distributing a limited number of events across several cities, it is concentrating a much larger programme in Mansoura, in Dakahlia Governorate, alongside its activities in Cairo.
The idea, Riyad insists, is not simply to send over performances but to create a complete theatrical experience. Audiences in Mansoura will encounter workshops, discussions, masterclasses and other parallel events alongside the performances, effectively creating a smaller version of the festival taking place in Cairo. Rather than presenting a handful of performances, the festival is transforming the city into what Riyad describes as “a celebration of theatre,” with activities spread across different venues and designed to reach not only Mansoura itself but also the surrounding towns and villages.
The festival’s slogan, “The National Festival Across Egypt,” reflects that ambition. Riyad hopes that, within the next four or five years, the festival will have travelled across every governorate in Egypt while maintaining its permanent base in Cairo. Still, the financial challenge remains. Riyad says the festival’s actual budget is very small compared with the size of the event and the scale of its activities. What makes the programme possible is the extensive logistical support provided by the Ministry of Culture. The festival can use state theatres, venues at the Cairo Opera House, the Academy of Arts, the Culture Palaces and the Supreme Council of Culture, together with the technical services that come with them. Those resources, he says, have enormous value. If the festival had to pay for them, their cost alone would exceed LE30 million.
The same applies to the people behind the festival. Workshop instructors, theatre professionals and members of the organising team receive only symbolic honoraria for the time and effort they invest. They continue because they believe in what they are doing. “The festival’s success is not the success of one person,” he says. “It is the success of a group. Teamwork is the real secret.” Despite his role as festival president, Riyad still considers himself an actor first and foremost. For nearly five months each year, however, his focus shifts almost entirely to the festival before he returns to acting once the festival closes. When Riyad and his generation started acting, he says, the dream was simply to perform on stage. They were not thinking about becoming stars. They loved theatre. It is the same spirit he hopes the festival will continue to nurture.
With the present, 19th round running from 25 July to 11 August, Riyad assures potential audiences and activity participants, “everything is free.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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