RIYADH, 16 October 2007 — Twelve plays staged at two prominent locations on the occasion of the Eid celebrations in the capital got an enthusiastic reception from the audience, which enjoyed the light comedies. The festival events will go on through the rest of the week.

Judging from the large attendance at both the venues — the King Fahd Cultural Center and the Kingdom Schools — the message was loud and clear: The citizens and residents of Riyadh long for recreational outlets, not just during the Eid festivities but rather all year long.

As Khaled Al-Ghamdi, one of the spectators, told Arab News: “Three days are not enough. We need a permanent facility to stage plays and films on a regular basis.”

One of the plays that regaled the audience was “Niswan.Net”, a light comedy revolving around the theme of social interaction in Saudi society. The mother of Huda, a computer teacher, sets the stage for the unfolding drama when she asks her daughter to put three other women through the basics of computer operation, so that they could surf the Internet.

But the problem is that it is a disparate group, with Sara, an educated socialite sharing the same neighborhood with other women who are not even literate. One of them is a matchmaker, the second a traditional wedding drummer and the third a poor woman who ekes out a living by selling trinkets in the local souq. Sara questions the credentials of these women and the ability of them to absorb a computer education when they have not even have an elementary education.

Unable to cope with the challenging assignment, the trio has to answer some basic questions as part of an aptitude test. How often do they interact with their neighbors? It turns out that the only interaction with their neighbors, as far as these women are concerned, is at the time of marriage, arranged by the matchmaker, while the drummer entertains the gathering by beating the drum. At the end of the play, Sara herself gets married in an ironic twist to this light comedy.

“The audience enjoyed it very much,” Hissa Al-Zahrani, one of the spectators, told Arab News. She said the theme of the comedy was that life has become so businesslike that even social interaction has got a commercial angle to it.

Meanwhile, eyebrows were raised at the decision of the Riyadh Municipality to cancel the circus in Suwaidy, a stronghold of the conservative authority of the Kingdom. A visit to the area in the south of Riyadh showed the tent surrounded by police patrol cars. But there was no sign of the circus troupe.

Arab News learned that the troupe cancelled the trip at the last moment, since they were offered a more lucrative offer by a neighboring country.