Theatre review: The Last Supper Dinner for none

SINGAPORE — Ahmed El Attar’s The Last Supper feels more like an extended skit than a play. Coming in at only an hour long, it makes its point effectively, but the story overall feels truncated, and literally does not go anywhere. Throughout the play, we are stuck at the same table, the same time and the same circumstances. It would work wonderfully as the centerpiece of a longer piece, but as it stands, the play is abrupt and has the feel of an unfinished work.

The Last Supper, which played from Aug 11 to 13, as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts, depicts a scene — a dinner party — from the life of a typical affluent Egyptian family.

The audience is thrown into the scene with no explanation and no backstory, and spends the first five minutes simply trying to figure out the relationships between the characters onstage and trying to keep up with the multiple conversations taking place. That is, until we realise that not keeping up with everything is sort of the point — none of the characters are themselves keeping up with anything anyone else says.

Over the course of the show, we are given an insight into the characters’ obnoxious crassness, their carelessness about what is happening around them in their country (“In a month or two, everything will be back to normal”), their sexism, overweening air of superiority, heightened sensitivities and simultaneous lack of empathy and care for one another.

Most disturbingly, we witness their deliberate cruelty towards the servant class (one character actively encourages a young boy to hit the butler serving them) and their callous sneers at and denigration of the “vermin” class.

Some might be tempted to see these as characteristics unique to the Egyptian upper-class, but El Attar makes it clear that there are aspects of them that we all recognise and share. These include their modernity (only two women on stage wore the hijab — one did not), their tech-savviness (as we saw the younger family members explaining Instagram and selfies to their elders), their obsession with consumption and material wealth (the character of the Father spoke of everything only in terms of how much it cost), and their cosmopolitanism (in one spirited exchange, the family debates which is the best — America, London or Paris).

Much has been written about the global elite in recent times and how they seem to have more in common with one another than with the poor and downtrodden in their own countries. If that is the case, then El Attar’s play is a reminder that the potential for revolutions, such as the Arab Spring, are borne out of anger at the ruling classes, and we should not congratulate ourselves on having escaped the kind of upheavals that affected countries such as Egypt too soon.

The universality of El Attar’s play is underscored by his decision to name a play that opens with two men bowed in Muslim prayer after one of the most famous icons/images of Christianity. It is a hint that we will find dinner scenes like this playing out in countries other than in Egypt and its Arab counterparts.

The title also takes on another significance when we realise that for most of the play, the chair in the centre of the long table on stage remains empty (ostensibly because the host’s wife refuses to show up). This is, El Attar implies, a table devoid of God and godliness — in spite of the overt act of piousness that opens the play.

It is The Last Supper without Christ at its head and the crassness, materialism and cruelty on show are, he implies, what we will see when God disappears from your dinner table.