زنقة الرجالة

A social club is on the verge of bankruptcy, prompting an extraordinary general assembly to withdraw confidence from the "elected" secretary-general, who squandered the club's budget on banquets, travels, and funding his relatives and clan. A third-rate wedding belly dancer enters, accompanied by a drummer and a burly bodyguard. The dancer offers to fund the club with one million pounds in exchange for hosting her licentious parties there. The members object, fiercely proud of their club, which had hosted prominent writers and philosophers for intellectual seminars, major international orchestras for world-class concertos and operas, as well as prestigious sculpture and fine art exhibitions. A foreign tourist enters, whom the secretary-general addresses as "dear friend." She professes respect for the club's storied history and offers a massive, non-refundable grant, conditional on conducting an experiment with a random sample of citizens. Six passersby are selected after being led to believe that television is holding a contest with a 10,000-pound prize: an itinerant popcorn vendor, a wealthy aristocratic girl seeking fame, a university graduate unemployed for ten years who turned into a con artist, a leftist intellectual haunted by terror from prison torture, a poor woman raising her orphaned children after their father drowned in a ferry disaster, and an expert in groundwater discovery for desert greening. The foreigner paints a blue space (the sky) at the top of a white sheet of paper and a yellow space at the bottom (the desert), then asks the contestants: "What is missing from this painting for life to be complete?" Each answers according to their need. The vendor: "People, customers." The heiress: "Oil." The unemployed man: "Blood." The leftist: "Justice." The poor woman: "Food." The water prospector: "Crops." The foreigner nods in agreement, confirming that the green color (crops) is missing and that they must create it by mixing the blue and yellow colors with a drop of water, without using ready-made water. That is the riddle, with a time limit of thirty minutes. The play continues as the contestants scatter in search of a drop of water worth 10,000 pounds. The poor woman weeps as she remembers her destitution and her children's plight, causing her tear to fall onto the paper. The prospector grabs a pickaxe and digs into the earth, and the sweat from his brow drips onto the paper, creating the green color from tears and sweat. At this point, the foreigner erupts in anger, grumbling indignantly that she had wished the Egyptians would solve their problems solely with tears, not with sweat—for a people that works cannot be occupied or subjugated.

• CategoriesComedy