A fire that began when an actor knocked over a candle on the set of a play ripped through a crowded theater in this central Egyptian city late Monday, sparking a stampede of audience members and killing at least 29 people, survivors and officials said.

The fire spread quickly across the set, which was made entirely of paper and had been ringed with candles. Panicked audience members trampled each other trying to get out the one available exit door, which at one point was partially blocked by a piece of wood that fell during the blaze, survivors said.

"Everyone was trying to save themselves and they were falling all over each other," Mohammed Arafat Yassin, 27, recovering at Beni Suef hospital, told The Associated Press. "It was like being inside a barbecue grill. Everyone was burning."

The blaze broke out in the "Culture Palace," a facility run by the Culture Ministry, on a downtown street of Beni Suef, a farming town of 200,000 people about 60 miles south of Cairo. The cultural center was on the third day of a nine-day theater festival featuring plays performed by troupes from around Egypt.

About 1,000 people were watching a theater group from the nearby region of Fayoum performing a play called "Grab Your Dreams" when the fire broke out at about 11:45 p.m.

The play was set in a zoo, and the stage was done up like a cave inside one of the animal cages: The ceiling, floor and walls were covered with paper bags painted to resemble stone, and in the middle of the stage was a "mountain" also made of paper. There were candles set up all over the set, survivors said.

In the final scene, one of the actors was shaking another character to wake him up, and the movement knocked over one of the candles.

"The room became engulfed in flames. The flames were like an ocean spreading across the theater," said another survivor, Mohammed el-Amrousi, 23, an acting student from the northern city of Alexandria.

The bodies of at least 29 people were brought to the morgue at Beni Suef's main hospital; 37 people injured were also treated, hospital director Ahmed el-Sharqawi said. One police official said as many as 60 were injured.

The small, four-story hospital was overwhelmed, with rooms crammed with severely burned victims. El-Sharqawi said most of the injured had burns over 30 percent to 90 percent of their bodies. He did not say how many of the dead died from the stampede and how many from the fire itself.

Yassin said there were only two exit doors from the theater, but one of them was covered in the same paper as the set and was in flames. So the crowd rushed for the other. As they streamed out, a piece of wood fell, partially blocking it. He and some others managed to climb around it, but it slowed the escape, he said.

PHOTO CAPTION

Friends and relatives of the victims look on as a severely burned man is taken from Beni Suef General hospital to an ambulance that is headed for a Cairo hospital Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005. (AP)