Hamlet has already been performed as a Middle East summit

Hamlet... If There Is Time, staged by a Swedish production company, has been the focus of the International Festival of Experimental Theatre in Cairo.

"We had four clowns on stage, and from the 72 pages of the Shakespearian text we were reduced to 14 pages," Egyptian actress and art critic Eva Dahdrin told BBC World Service's The Ticket programme.

"We had just one scene - the first scene - played completely, and that was not even completed because we had a prompter helping the clowns to read the text."

Performance

Ms Dahdrin said the essence of the play - and one of the reasons it had been a success - was the involvement of the audience.

"It was not really a Hamlet. What it was was complete interaction between the four clowns and the public," she explained.

Someone can't choose their life in wartime, and their life is worse Hani El-Mettenawi

"They talked to the public, mocked the photographers, and discussed with a latecomer why they were late."

Meanwhile, the biggest hit and prize-winner of the festival has been an Egyptian production - Masks, Fabrics, Destinies - presented by a young group of actors.

Though the play begins with a weaver calling on people to grab the "yarns of life," it is a heavyweight work focusing on mankind's bloodlust.

"We were talking about war, war changing destinies," the play's director Hani El-Mettenawi explained to The Ticket.

"Someone can't choose their life in wartime, and their life is worse."

Broader theme

The script contains poetry from around the world, including Morocco, India - and Iraq.

"All these writers, all these poems see war and they suffer, they have these hard times," El-Mettanawi said.

"We are talking about this war around the world. We are sharing the worries about it."

The play was originally based on recent events in Iraq, but El-Mettanawi re-scripted it to make the theme broader.

All the actors in the production wear masks - a device to show the restrictions on the characters' destinies, El-Mettanawi stated.

"They never choose their life," he said.

"They have to live like that. It's not what they really want - that is the mask."