In the 1990s, a pair of independent feminist theatre-makers approached the head of a major European country’s cultural centre to ask for funding for their women’s theatre project. “I have it on good authority that theatre is not a genuine Egyptian art form”, said the high-ranking European official, “and so we are only funding native Egyptian art forms such as storytelling and puppetry.”

Fortunately this narrow view is now mostly changed, and we are moving out of the days when colonialist perception unwittingly went hand-in-hand with repressive Egyptian laws to stifle independent theatre. As in many countries throughout the globe, traditional modes of performance now flourish in Egypt side-by-side (sometimes in tandem) with new and diverse forms. Stand-up comedy, storytelling and the traditional Egyptian qaraqoz (puppet clown) combine with proscenium arch theatre and texts both Egyptian and imported. But this is not to say that everything in the garden is rosy.

Although there is a governmental performance space actually named the Avant-Garde Theatre, it is generally verifiable that, since the early 1990s, the officially-produced state theatre has followed the ‘avant-garde’ trends first set by independent theatre makers. Despite the so-called ‘Golden Sixties’, the theatre of that time was, in fact,...