By the early seventies the dramatic movement of the previous two decades began to lose its momentum. The government's interest in drama seemed to be on the wane, and the commercial theatre once more reasserted itself. One critic was to write about the movement a few years later a book with the significant title The Flowering and the Fall of the Egyptian Theatre. A symptom of the decline can be seen in the change in the title of the state-sponsored leading theatre monthly in 1974, to al-Sinimā waʿl-Masraḥ (Cinema and Stage), a cheaper, more glossy magazine, with the theatre section relegated to a handful of pages towards the end of each issue. Gone were the serious articles on dramatists and theatre matters, gone were the detailed lengthy reviews of individual plays and productions, as well as the complete texts of plays, which were for a long time a regular feature of each issue. Instead, we find gossip and brief comments and frequently a short editorial, unconvincingly denying the allegation, made by many intellectuals, that the Egyptian theatre was passing through a crisis, brushing it aside as a false charge by ‘cliques’ (shilal) now out of favour, which had dominated the Egyptian theatrical scene in the mid-sixties, implying no doubt that they were motivated primarily by political considerations.