by Marcus Youssef with Camyar Chai

based on the novel by Naguib Mahfouz

Directed by Camyar Chai

Winner of the 2007 Alcan Performing Arts Award for Theatre

Co-commissioned by the Magnetic North Festival for presentation at the June 2006 Festival in St. John’s Newfoundland

February 2 - 10, 2007 at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre

Developed in partnership with the Playwrights Theatre Centre (Vancouver) and dramaturge Martin Kinch.

A group of friends get together every night on a Nile River houseboat to get baked and thumb their noses at a crazy world. When a crusading journalist joins the group, the Cairo houseboat starts to feel like it's been transplanted to flood-ravaged New Orleans. The Big Chill meets Omar Sharif getting high with a hijab-wearing Simone de Beauvoir.

Featuring Kathleen Duborg, Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, James Long, Bill Marchant, Tom McBeath, Tom Pickett, Laara Sadiq, and Maiko Bae Yamamoto. Design Team: Rob Lewis (set and props), Jonathan Ryder (lighting), Francesca Granzini (costumes), Tim Matheson (projections) and featuring live accompaniment by Montreal-based composer Sam Shalabi. Cultural and translation consultation by Liliane Karnouk. Stage Management by Anne Taylor with Danielle Fecko. Production Assistant Sumayya Kassamali.

"We are both humbled and honoured to have the support of Alcan and two of Canada's premiere artistic organizations for productions of Adrift on the Nile from coast to coast. This support offers a small, artist-run company from BC the opportunity to do something most companies only dream of: to develop and refine a theatrical piece through two full-scale productions 7500 km and eight months apart. This allows us to showcase our work, as it evolves, on both the East and the West coasts: at the Magnetic North Festival in Newfoundland and, following a subsequent period of work on the play, at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in February 2007. We invite you to see both productions and witness this rare opportunity. We thank Magnetic North, Alcan, and the VECC for their prodigious support of British Columbia artists."
- Camyar, Marcus & Adrienne