Adrift

"Adrift is a play about the tragedy of the innocents caught between the Holy Wars of our twenty-first century." "A group of urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up and complicating their lives, trying to forget that secularists like them are being shunted to the sidelines in the wave of "fundamentalist" Islamic politics sweeping much of the Arab world." "When Samara, a young Islamic journalist joins the group, however, their host Anis' spell is broken - he has fallen in love. Unfortunately for him, however, this seemingly devout journalist also has a couple of secrets of her own." "Inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift is set against the backdrop of the US war on Iraq and a region burdened by the gorgon-head legacies of colonialism, corruption and violent dictatorship. It is about a group of people at the epicentre of conflict between the West's ever-accelerating and utterly ahistorical imperial culture of commoditization and capital, and its Doppelganger: the tide of religious fundamentalism that is growing ever more powerful in its wake."--Jacket.