The Al-Hamlet Summit (Al-Bassam, 2004)

1
Shakespeare touched the Arab world astonishingly early. In 1608, during the 3^rd voyage of the East India Company, on the island of Socotra at the entry to the Gulf of Aden, the crew of the Red Dragon staged a performance of Hamlet, a play then less than a decade old, and published only 5 years previously.  The ship’s captain William Keeling obviously shared Shakespearean interests with his patron (and major East India Company member) the Earl of Southampton (see Holderness and Loughrey, ‘Arabesque’, 2006).

Socotra is now an integral part of the Arab Republic of Yemen; and Hamlet needs of course no introduction. Shortly after the First World War, F.S. Boas conferred on the English Merchant Navy ‘the proud distinction of having been the pioneer in carrying Shakespearean drama into the uttermost ends of the earth’ (Boas, p. 95).  Yemen no longer seems quite so distant from the United Kingdom, but this example of Hamlet exported to the Middle East by agents of a nascent British Empire certainly confirms Michael Neill’s judgement that Shakespeare’s plays were ‘entangled from the beginning with the projects of nation-building, empire and colonization’ (Neill, p. 168)

2
Shakespeare re-entered the Arab world in the late 19^th century as theatre; that is, the plays were translated and adapted specifically to form the repertoire of dramatic companies in Egypt and other Arab countries. Hamlet was first performed in Egypt around 1893, and was immediately popular with local audiences, who had a strong taste for ghosts, revenge and madness. Productions were based on translations derived from 18^th century French versions of Shakespeare. Hence the play was radically adapted, with whole scenes deleted and songs introduced; with Hamlet making love to Ophelia in the language of Arab love poetry, and with all obscenity discreetly purged. Above all the play was converted from Shakespeare’s tragedy into a historical romance, in which Hamlet defeats his uncle, ascends the throne, and reigns with the Ghost’s blessing: ‘may you live a joyful life on earth, pardoned in heaven’ (translation by Tanius ‘Abdoh, quoted by Al-Shetawi, p. 44).  The ‘happy ending’ Hamlet of the French versions, though clearly shaped by Enlightenment views of Shakespeare, were actually more faithful to the story of Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus than was the Shakespearean tragedy, just as Nahum Tate’s notorious happy-ending King Lear restored the Lear-tale to its original romance form. In Egypt in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Hamlet flourished as a stage show, independently of textual scholarship, and appeared in radically revised, rewritten, and reconstructed adaptations. Early Arab Shakespeare shared this wide liberty of adaptation with the Restoration and 18^th century theatres, where (as David Scott Kastan puts it):

On the stage … Shakespeare was not merely modernized, but aggressively modified to satisfy the expectations of the fashionable audiences that filled the theatres … turned … into a contemporary playwright, at once modern and highbrow, for the theatrical environment in which he was now performed …   (Kastan, p. 14).

This ungenerous view of the Restoration theatre is echoed in Mahmoud Al-Shetawi’s harsh judgement of early Arab Shakespeare: ‘Overall, the early stage productions of Hamlet were crude, vulgarizing Shakespeare’s masterpiece in order to please the illiterate audience’ (Shetawi, p. 46). Alexander Pope said much the same of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Free adaptation from French models continued to be the norm in Arab cultures:  the translation of Hamlet made by Khalil Mutran from the French (1916), in which Hamlet kills Claudius and ascends the throne, remained popular in Egypt for many years.

Shakespeare’s absorption into Middle Eastern culture was not therefore by any means a simple process of imperialist transmission and passive colonial reception. ‘Shakespeare’ wrote Nadia Al-Bahar ‘was transplanted into Arab soil’ (Al-Bahar, p. 13).  ‘Transplanted’ indicates not a simple exchange but a cross-cultural migration across borders, in which the artefact becomes rooted in different soil, and there adapts itself to the local climate and conditions. Hamlet has been ‘assimilated’, said Al-Shetawi, thoroughly woven into the ‘fabric of Arab creative processes’ (p. 60).

Hamlet was continuously produced in Egypt from the late 19^th century onwards, in several different translations. This performance tradition did not on the other hand produce a consistent ‘Arab’ interpretation of Hamlet. ‘The play’, writes Al-Shetawi, ‘has always been known to the Arab audience and frequently staged in the Arab world’; but it has also ‘always been adapted to suit the conditions of local Arab theatres and native culture’. Appropriations have for example been sharply divided between heroic and anti-heroic Hamlets: sometime in the late 1970s, Hamlet the romantic freedom fighter of the postcolonial tradition gave way to a series of Hamlets disarmed, impotent and emotionally crippled by the weight of their destiny. These divergences can be seen in  productions and adaptations from Egypt, Syria and Tunisia: Hamlet wakes Up Late (Syria 1976); A Theatre Company Found  a Theatre and Dramatized Hamlet (Tunisia and Jordan 1984); Dance of the Scorpions (Egypt 1989); Forget Hamlet/Ophelia’s Window (Egypt 1994). All these plays deploy technical devices to challenge the norms of conventional theatrical representation; all are sceptical about the power of words to achieve change. Claudius is invariably the powerful Arab despot, while Hamlet is the ‘Arab intellectual, a figure who is commonly portrayed as impotent when it comes to responding positively to the miserable conditions of his country’ (Al-Shetawi, p. 48).

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This complex tradition was one of the starting-points for Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit, first performed, in Arabic with English surtitles, as part of the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival, in August 2002, where it was awarded the Fringe First Award for excellence and innovation in writing and directing. It was subsequently presented at the 14th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre, in September 2002, where it won Best Performance and Best Director Awards. Subsequently it has played at the Riverside Studios in London (March 2004), the Singapore Arts Festival (June 2005), and at Elsinore Castle in Denmark (August 2005).

The work had previously been through various adaptations of the Shakespeare text, from 2001 onwards, performed by the Zaoum Theatre Company: Hamlet in Kuwait, performed in Kuwait (2001), and The Arab League Hamlet, performed at a festival in Tunisia (2001). The earlier versions were both adaptations of the Shakespeare text.  The Al-Hamlet Summit by contrast jettisoned Shakespeare’s language and rewrote Hamlet into modern English with a strongly Arabic flavour, producing what the author called a ‘cross-cultural construction’ (Al-Bassam 2003). Al-Bassam produced and performed versions in both Arabic and English. This edition for the first time makes available a definitive text of The Al-Hamlet Summit in both English and Arabic.

Al-Bassam’s play maps a Middle Eastern political tragedy onto the template of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The key characters carry Shakespearean names, and occupy parallel situations within their own modern Middle Eastern world. Hamlet’s father, the old ruler, has been poisoned, and his position usurped by Claudius his brother, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Saddam Hussein. Gertrude and Ophelia, Polonius and Laertes all play roles comparable to those of their Shakespearean namesakes, but redomesticated into an Islamic Arab context.  The regime is threatened, as Denmark is threatened at the beginning of Hamlet, by Fortinbras’s troops lining the borders, and internally by the ‘People’s Liberation Brigade’, which has been distributing leaflets claiming Old Hamlet was assassinated.  Where Claudius in Shakespeare’s play resolves the Norwegian threat by diplomacy, Claudius in Al-Hamlet responds with violence and atrocity:

POLONIUS: I’ve got 300 men working round the clock gathering up the leaflets.

CLAUDIUS: Forget the leaflets, burn the townships, all of them – I want them all burnt by dawn.

Fortinbras’s army is backed by the West, ‘armed with millions of dollars of foreign equipment’. Behind the suggestions of foreign intervention lies the West’s greed for Arab oil (Claudius is obsessively concerned to protect the pipelines from sabotage).

In a scene which is the equivalent of Hamlet 3.3, instead of displaying remorse and praying for forgiveness, Claudius voices what is virtually a religion of oil and dollars:

Oh God: Petro dollars.  Teach me the meaning of petro dollars. I have no other God than you, I am created in your image, I seek guidance from you the All Seeing, the All Knowing Master of Worlds, Prosperity and Order …

At the end of the play Fortinbras clearly intends to sustain this policy and this faith: ‘It won’t be easy, terrorism is not yet defeated, but the pipeline will be completed within a year’.

The West appears in the play in the shadowy persona of the Arms Dealer, who spoke English in the Arabic version, and was played by a woman in the English version. The Arms Dealer converses with Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius and finally Fortinbras.  S/he will provide weapons to anyone prepared to pay, even if s/he is arming opponents.  S/he remains in place at the end: ‘As the lights begin to fade, the Arms Dealer enters and walks downstage incredibly slowly.’

Just as in Hamlet Claudius recognises that the real enemy of his regime lies within, so Claudius and Polonius in The Al-Hamlet Summit are vigilant against signs of domestic subversion. Opposition and dissent are read as fundamentalist terrorism. Polonius sees in Hamlet’s letters to Ophelia the ‘apocalyptic imagery’, the ‘yearning for violent and comprehensive change to the world order’ which are naturally linked with ‘terrorist activities’. Both Hamlet and Ophelia become Islamicised, adopting traditional Muslim costume; and both become from the perspective of the ruling regime ‘terrorists’. Ophelia is associated, as Yvette Khoury has observed, with the Palestinian cause (Khoury 2005), and dies as a suicide bomber; Hamlet (who adopts ‘shortened muslim dress and long beard’) shoots Polonius, and at the end of the play is seen leading the liberation army.

CLAUDIUS: Just two hours ago, our forces began an attack on terrorist positions belonging to Hamlet and his army.  These continue as I speak.  This conflict began when Hamlet laid siege to our democracy, our values and our people through a brutal series of kidnappings and terrorist bombings that have killed many innocent victims and shocked the world community.

The equation between Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist militant is one that Hamlet internalises. This is the equivalent of Hamlet’s revenge, a vindictive fantasy bloodbath explicitly expressed in the language of the Holy Q’uran:

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammad is his messenger… I will clean this land, I will make it pure, I understand, I do understand, but I will cleanse it for you, I will prepare it for your return, even if it costs me my life, I will clean it, I will purge it, blood will flow, I will make blood flow in torrents, I swear in my father’s name, I swear in the name of Allah.

4
Where does this adaptation sit vis-à-vis both Arab Shakespeare and dominant theatrical interpretations of the play in the West?  Al-Bassam’s Hamlet is not the passive figure of recent Arab plays, but rather recalls  the hero Hamlets of the 1960s and 1970s. In some ways Al-Bassam has by-passed the previous two decades, and reconnected with an older Arabic tradition. The Al-Hamlet Summit is divided into sections corresponding to the Islamic times of prayer, which seems to echo Riyad ‘Ismat’s 1973 Damascus production, where the play was divided into three parts – huzn (sorrow), al-thawra (rebellion), al-shahadah (martyrdom) (see Al-Shetawi, p 48).

On the other hand the figure of the Islamic militant which Al-Bassam’s Hamlet grows to resemble, cannot be so easily identified with the heroes of a previous century, though he is certainly an active crusader against corruption and a militant for justice:

HAMLET: The real enemy is here, in the palace, amongst us.

LAERTES: There will be no nation to fight over unless we defeat Fortinbras.

HAMLET: We’ll have no nation to lose unless we destroy the rot that devours us from within.

Hamlet becomes wholly the man of action, rejecting language and the intellect, committing himself unequivocally to violence:

HAMLET: … the time for the pen has passed and we enter the era of the sword … No more words … Words have been killed, they died on our tongues and in our ears, words are dead. We cannot us them anymore, now we must speak with our flesh.

On the other hand, although Hamlet’s death is a significant gesture of martyrdom (‘I do not approximate God/I come closer to him/in giving of myself’), it is only one detail in the final scene of universal carnage, where a failed coup-d’etat, the converging of Western power and Fortinbras’s assumption of authority are all presented with the excited objectivity of a media event. If Hamlet does ‘clean this land’ it is only to create an empty space into which Fortinbras can move his troops. Islamic militancy has not provided a solution, only a dramatic denouement:

FORTINBRAS: I have biblical claims upon this land, it is empty and barren and my presence here is a fact that has not been invented.

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Insofar as there was a separate, local Arab tradition of adapting and appropriating Shakespeare, Al-Bassam’s work is obviously part of it. But by writing also in English, Al-Bassam has also chosen to work partially inside an Anglophone culture (or set of cultures), which is, as Michael Neill phrases it, ‘saturated with Shakespeare’: ‘Our ways of thinking about such basic issues as nationality, gender and racial difference are inescapably inflected by his writing’ (Neill, p. 184). Al-Bassam has explicitly confirmed that the work is ‘cross-cultural’, speaking from an Arab perspective but also to an English-speaking audience.

The script was written from a contemporary Arab perspective. It carries many concerns and issues of today’s Arab world and its relationship to the West. At the same time, it addresses these concerns to an English-speaking audience. The cross-cultural construction of the piece creates a sense of implication in the affairs of the other. (Dent 2003)

This sounds like the cultural ‘hybridity’ that occurs when an imperial discourse penetrates a post-colonial culture and merges with local and native materials to produce a synthetic fusion. But The Al-Hamlet Summit does not fit so easily into this or any of the available models provided by post-colonial criticism. Any writer who so deliberately places his work on a cultural or national margin, or seeks to work across territorial and historical borders, is seeking a difficult and precarious balance, and is likely to find himself challenged from all sides, as Al-Bassam himself confirms:

For some The Al-Hamlet Summit was the work of a Westernised traitor that falsely approximated between Islam and the propagation of violence. For others, and I’m happy to say the majority and particularly the young, The Al-Hamlet Summit gave vital and much-needed expression to today’s Arab concerns and presented them to the West in a sophisticated and human form (Al-Bassam, 2003).

Even Al-Bassam’s admirers have found themselves questioning his position. Peter J. Smith (2004) asks:

Is it not the case that the portrayal of Hamlet and Ophelia as Muslim fundamentalists and suicide bombers will have the effect of exacerbating – even promoting – the racist assumptions typified by the tabloid press? (74-5).

But then Smith questions his own authority to make such judgements: ‘Who am I as a non-Muslim, non-Arabic speaking Englishman to tell Sulayman Al-Bassam how to write and direct his adaptation?’ (Smith, p. 75).

These critical responses are all however testimony to The Al-Hamlet Summit’s capacity to generate dialogue across borders, dialogue that challenges and questions and enters reservations, but remains fundamentally an international conversation. As such it offers an alternative, an urgently imperative alternative, to mutual misunderstanding and reciprocal violence. What Al-Bassam called the ‘cultural symbiosis’ manifest in the play was clearly designed to form a ground of dialogue between East and West. The move from the earlier versions, which were adaptations of the Shakespeare text, to a more contemporary form which allowed for the fuller expression of Arab experience, was clearly critical in this process.

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The writing of The Al-Hamlet Summit  began with the experience of globalisation:

I was in Cairo with an exiled Iraqi theatre director and a Palestinian theatre troupe from Ramallah drinking coffee in the bazaar when a boy came running past us, chanting: ’Al-Kull murtabit / Am-reeca qarabit’ (’Everything is linked /

America just got closer…’). It was September the 11th and news from New York was just beginning to stream across the television screens. In all the confusion of that night, I remember the words of one of the Palestinian actors: ‘The hell in New York today will bring hell to Ramallah tomorrow’ (Al-Bassam 2003).

9/11 is the supreme instance of globalisation, viewed here from a range of different perspectives. The boy’s chant seems to celebrate with a certain triumphalism the shrinking globe and the ease with which Islamic terrorism can reach to the very heart of America’s political and economic institutions. The Palestinian actor thinks ruefully of the consequences, immediate reprisal not from America but from Israel, and against the Palestinians. Global events know no barriers of time and space.

In an article on 9/ll British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed these sentiments exactly. 9/11 ‘brought home the true meaning of globalisation’:

In this globalised world, once chaos and strife have got a grip on a region or a country, trouble is soon exported.… It was, after all, a dismal camp in the foothills of Afghanistan that gave birth to the murderous assault on the sparkling heart of New York’s financial centre (Blair 119).

This is the negative side of globalisation. But from Blair’s perspective, globalisation also provides the potential solution to such problems. Blair reflects that the West can ‘use the power of community to bring the benefits of globalisation to all’ (121) in the form of truly universal values: ‘values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and a pluralist society… Values that are “universal and worthy of respect in every culture”’ (122). The vehicle for disseminating these values globally is economic penetration: increased trade flows, and greater involvement of the private sector in public finance (121).

Al-Bassam clearly intended the The Al-Hamlet Summit as an intervention into this fraught conversation:

The globalisation of politics is deceptive. Every Arab knows that George Bush said ‘either you are with us or you are against us’ and everyone in the West now knows that Saddam is bad. This is globalisation of politics, but it does very little to increase dialogue between cultures. All it does it promote vacuous ‘world views’. This is where culture and theatre become vital. They permit complexity and difference and they permit the weak to be other than pitied and the cruel to be other than hated. Theatre challenges the accepted world views and breaks the mirrors of authority. Shakespeare understood that power very well (Dent).

Globalisation is not only inevitable but desirable, since it is the only route to mutual understanding and a stable world. Everything really is linked, as the Arab boy recognised. The problem is how to develop those links without conflict and violence; without the supremacy of the West; without the suppression of alternative cultures and consequent global homogenisation. In this process theatre has a critical role to play:

The events of 9-11 and the political fallout since have drawn to light the inextricable intertwining of the fates of Arab peoples and those of the West.
Everything is linked and the much-touted ‘clash of civilizations’ simplifies and tries to obscure what is a complex series of overlapping and interpenetrating cultural realities that are tied together in fatal symbiosis (Al-Bassam 2003).

This is quite a different approach from Tony Blair’s vision of a universalisation of enlightenment values of liberal democracy via the spread of free-market capitalism. Though he does not speak for Islamic fundamentalism or terrorist violence, Al-Bassam shows them as the inevitable consequences of an alliance between native Arab despotism and the economic machinations of the West. In Shakespeare Hamlet is driven reluctantly towards revenge, and in The Al-Hamlet Summit Hamlet and Ophelia seem to have no option but the bloody and suicidal course they undertake.

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Between 1608, when Shakespeare’s lines echoed emptily from the deck of the Red Dragon around the Arab world, and 2001, when Al-Bassam’s adaptation found a common acceptance across both East and West, empires rose and fell. But one thing changed. In 1608 Shakespeare was virtually talking to himself. In 2001 Shakespeare was the substance of a global conversation. ‘Everything is linked’ in the globalised world, either through violence or through an acceptance of reciprocal ‘implication’. The Al-Hamlet Summit opens a conversation over the ground of our reconciliation.

 

Works Cited

I am very grateful to Margaret Litvin, Yvette Khoury, Peter J. Smith and Sulayman Al-Bassam for providing material used in the writing of this introduction.

Al-Bahar, Nadia, 1976. ‘Shakespeare in Early Arabic Adaptations’, Shakespeare Translation, 3.

Al-Bassam, Sulayman, 2003. ‘Introduction to the publication of The Al-Hamlet Summit’ in Theatre Forum Magazine, 22 ( Winter/Spring).

Blair, Tony, 2002. ‘The Power of World Community’, in Mark Leonard, ed. Re-Ordering the World. London: Foreign Policy Centre.

Boas, Frederick S., 1923. Shakespeare and the Universities and Other Studies in Elizabethan Drama. New York: Appleton.

Dent, Shirley, 2003. ‘Interview: Sulayman Al-Bassam’, Culture Wars. N.p. [Accessed 11 November 2005]

Holderness, Graham and Bryan Loughrey, 2006. ‘Arabesque: Shakespeare and Globalisation’. Essays and Studies: Globalisation and its Discontents. English Association/Boydell and Brewer.

Kastan, David Scott, 1999. Shakespeare After Theory. London: Routledge.

Khoury, Yvette, 2005. ‘”Glaring Stare”: Middle Eastern Presentation of Ophelia’. Paper presented to the Modern Language Association, 2005 Annual Convention, seminar on ‘Gender in Arabic Interpretations of Shakespeare’, Washington DC.

Litvin, Margaret, 2005. ‘Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit in the Arab Hamlet Tradition’. Paper presented  to the American Comparative Literature Association, 2005 Annual Meeting, Pennsylvania State University.

Loomba, Ania  and Martin Orkin, eds, 1998. Post-colonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge.

Neill, Michael, 1998. ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre’, in Loomba and Orkin (1998) 164-185.

Smith, Peter J., 2004. ‘Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit in an Age of Terrorism’. Shakespeare Bulletin, 22:4, 65-78.

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[Originally published in the Critical Survey , vol 19 , no. 3 , pp. 124-143. Reprinted by permission of the author.]

Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, a familiarity independent of the history plays, Henry VI and Richard III, in which he appears. This celebrity has less to do with Richard’s historical reputation, and more with the way in which great actors of the 19^th and 20^th centuries gave the role status and popular visibility, particularly perhaps via Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version.[1] Just as Hamlet is automatically identifiable by black suit and prop skull, Richard is immediately recognisable by his legendary deformity (mandatory hump, optional limp), and by the famous opening lines of his initial soliloquy:

Now is the winter of our discontent…

The phrase has also of course escaped from Richard, as he escapes from the play: it was much used in Britain during the successive years of bitter labour dispute in the early 1970s, becoming inseparable from an environment of strikes, picket-lines, power cuts. But it still belongs to Richard. When Peter Sellers guested on the Muppet Show, he delivered ‘the soliloquy from Richard III’ (with a distinct resemblance to Olivier), ‘whilst (and at the same time) playing tuned chickens’.[2]

Spectators of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s adaptation of Richard III, An Arab Tragedy, performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford in February 2007, encounter from the outset an immediate disruption of convention and expectation, since the first person on the stage, the first to speak, is not Richard at all, but a woman, Queen Margaret.

– I am Margaret…

…You needn’t be concerned about me…

…We lost…

…It is your right to ignore me. I would ignore myself if my history let me…

…I don’t want your loans, your gifts, your reconstruction grants.
I don’t want your pity…

…We lost…

…All I ask from you is not to question my thirst for revenge…

…It’s not because I’m Arab…

…I have a degree …

…anyway, my name is not Margaret…

…But our history is so awful, even the victors have changed their names (ATS, p. 1).^[3]

Margaret traverses the stage with a suitcase, which she opens and closes to reveal bundled clothes.[4] She establishes an immediate link between the different ‘pasts’ of the play – c. 1400 and the early 1590s – and the present. In the dimension of the play’s historical subject, the Wars of the Roses, she is representative, as widow of Henry VI, of the defeated Lancastrian faction. In the late 16th century domain of the play’s composition, she speaks for vengeance, especially through the languages of revenge tragedy and witchcraft. But in the present of the spectator’s existence, she is immediately identifiable as a refugee, dispossessed and rejected, ignored by history and the politics of power. Stateless, propertyless, abandoned, her suitcase contains the few belongings she has managed to keep with her. She has changed her name, lost her identity, is insulted and patronised by the fake philanthropy of post-invasion reconstruction. But she retains enough pride to muster a fierce rejection of the audience’s ‘pity’.

Al-Bassam begins his play, then, not with a man, but a woman; with a woman who is not English, but declares herself to be Arab; not with a theatrical star, but with a marginal figure; and not with one of victors who, in Walter Benjamin’s formulation, normally have the privilege of writing history, but with one of the defeated. Expecting Richard III and ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’, the audience instead encounters a figure instantly recognisable as an Arab refugee, Lebanese or Palestinian or Iraqui, of the type who appears daily on our television screens.[5] Although this is Shakespeare, she speaks Arabic, and the non-Arabic-speaking British spectator has access to her words only through translation. The Arabic text actually spoken by the actors was formed from Al-Bassam’s English adaptation of Shakespeare’s play; and the English surtitles read by the audience derived from the Arabic version (Al-Bassam adapted the play in English, then had it translated into Arabic, then produced an English version of the Arabic text to serve as the parallel English medium of performance). Languages divide and interweave, past and present diverge and assimilate, East and West are contrasted and temporarily merged.[6] Is this here, or there? Now, or then?[7] Self, or other?

When Richard does speak, it is with an effect ‘as strangely familiar as it is alien’:[8]

– The earth has changed its robes. The sorrows of winter and the cold bite of metal given way to the lazy warmth of spring…

…War is too fat for its armour, too drunk to roar.
And all we hear today are the blasts of pleasure giggles,..

…Fighters who waged the valiant fight are seen today  clean whiskered, soft skinned, slipping around in a lover’s bed…

…oiling whisper lusts with pleasure screams…

…But I, whose chest is weighed with a weatherproof heart…

…Dispossessed of a mug  to draw a lusty female eye;
I, who was born to a mother with a narrow pelvis…

…who spat me into this world so battered, beaten, buckled  and underdone that even dogs bark at me!…

…Therefore since I cannot prove a lover I am determined to prove a villain,… (ATS, p. 1)

In the Shakespearean ‘original’[9] of this speech, Gloster’s climatic metaphors are closely bound up with political references (‘sun of York’, ‘clouds that loured upon our house’), and his discourses of war and peace are heavily influenced by the poetics of mediaeval chivalry and courtliness. In Al-Bassam’s version, the metaphorical horizon has shifted. The images of seasonal change are more elemental and pastoral; the erotic fantasies more orientalized; and the personal conviction of physical difference localized into a different paradigm of gender and family relations (‘born to a mother with a narrow pelvis’ is quite different in its impact from ‘deformed, unfinished, sent before my time’). Al-Bassam’s Richard has neither hump nor limp, though he later protests a physical affliction symptomatised by a neck-brace concealed beneath his military uniform. Reviewers and spectators saw him as charismatically handsome rather than hideously deformed. The language is Shakespeare and yet not Shakespeare; classical and demotic; poetic and idiomatic; Eastern and Western. In Al-Bassam’s initial adaptation text (ATT), the soliloquy was much closer to the Shakespearean ‘original’.

GLOUCESTER

The earth has changed its robes

The sorrows of winter and the cold bite of metal

Have given way to the lazy warmth of spring …

But I, whose chest is weighed with a weatherproof heart

Have no joy in such tricks –

I lack the frail agility of the soft men

And want the fashionable virtue of eunuchs …

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity ..
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (ATT, p. 1)

Here the modern, idiomatic and transcultural improvisations are cast into verse form, and modulate easily into a passage of unaltered Shakespeare. Al-Bassam preserves the Shakespearean rhythm with its effortlessly self-generating poetry, so that the decision to ‘prove a villain’ flows spontaneously from Richard’s scholastic discourse. By the time the text reached performance it had been through what Al-Bassam calls ‘a layered process of “arabisation” and re-appropriation’[10] , and emerged as a dramatic medium with an entirely different rhythm and structure.  In the ATS text Richard seems to tear his choice of villainy violently out of his complaint of deformity. There may be logic to this deduction, but it is the arbitrary logic of a megalomaniac will.

Al-Bassam has formally distinguished different conceptions of history at work in his play. Richard stands for a ‘linear’ teleology of history, planning, setting and seizing objectives, the iron will moving inexorably against obstacles to reach its targeted goal. Buckingham, Richmond and all the other political agents and instruments stand for an ‘East-West’ historical paradigm, still bifurcated by empire and its modern versions, history as manipulation and corruption, assassination and show trial. In Margaret, on the other hand, Al-Bassam saw a different kind of history: history as a cyclical recurrence, in which the past rises to meet the present, the dead wake, ghosts haunt the living, curses are efficacious and the passion of revenge never sleeps.[11] A scene where Margaret casts bones to foretell the future symptomatises this history of omen and portent, the dark shadows of a buried past and an unrevealed futurity.[12]

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy represents Sulayman Al-Bassam’s fourth Shakespearean experiment, and the third Shakespeare play he has adapted. Prior to his work on Richard III, he had written and produced an experimental improvisation on Macbeth, and three different versions of Hamlet. Hamlet in Kuwait, a version of Shakespeare’s text performed in English, was initiated in January 2001, in association with a cultural festival ‘Kuwait 2001: Cultural Capital of the Arab World’, a historic celebration of national independence and autonomy which marked the 10^th anniversary of Kuwait’s liberation from the Iraqi invasion.

Born in Kuwait, son of a Kuwaiti father and a British mother, Al-Bassam was educated in Britain and now resides in Kuwait. He speaks Arabic, and writes in English; his works are translated from English into Arabic by others, with his own participation.[13] Al-Bassam’s position within Kuwaiti society is that of a loyal citizen, but also that of an internal émigré, capable of viewing his country with a critical scepticism. He has expressed gratitude to the United States and its allies for the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, but offers an unqualified critique of American foreign policy.[14]  He is committed to the cultural development of the Kuwaiti nation, but is also acutely conscious of the nation’s need for radical political reform and cultural change.

Hence Hamlet was reoriented to highlight social and political parallels. Claudius is the Arab despot, ruling over a corrupt oligarchy. The young prince, struggling to define himself in a hostile environment, suggests the disillusioned but resourceful youth of Kuwait, resistant to the authority of the older generation, but diffident about the possibilities of action. The Ghost was a symbol of the Gulf war, a disturbing past that still haunts the people of Kuwait. The production performed 20 times to capacity audiences, playing to a mixed audience of Arabic and English-speakers.[15]

In speaking of his decision to choose Shakespeare for this exercise, Al-Bassam focuses on the political parallels that can be drawn from the plays, and on the classic status of Shakespeare that provides a kind of shield or mask for the radical dramatist.

Shakespeare seemed a natural choice. In addition to being rich, malleable and volatile material, Shakespeare guaranteed me my ‘green card’ past the Cyclops of the state censor and the prejudices of a largely conservative society.[16]

To some extent Shakespeare was a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Al-Bassam, a cultural monument that enabled him to smuggle critical views on his own society past the authorities and to the greedy intelligences of the theatre audience. Hamlet in Kuwait ‘encoded’ its meanings within a Shakespearean register ‘a cultural encoding that would allow the work’s meanings to override the various linguistic, cultural and political barriers in Kuwait and permit its meanings to explode in performance’.[17]

Al-Bassam’s next Shakespearean experiment, entitled The Arab League Hamlet and produced first in Tunisia later in 2001, was an adapted version of the Shakespeare text, with scenes cut and re-arranged, and the cast reduced down to a few principal players. The revised Jacobean text is punctuated with short scenes and interspersed lines in modern colloquial English. For the first time Al-Bassam used the ‘summit’ setting which added much to the success of The Al-Hamlet Summit. The characters occupied a space akin to a political assembly, sitting at and moving around desks and chairs.  In this new staging all of the characters were visible all of the time. Projection screens displayed the larger context of ‘an empire desecrated by war’ and the characters ‘adopted the grammar of diplomatic negotiations in a fight for their own survival’.[18]

The new setting threw the emphasis on explicit political parallels between the world of Shakespeare’s court and the modern Arab world, and invited response as to a piece of political theatre.

The Kuwait experience had taught me that Arab audiences are very quick to extract political meaning from theatrical signifiers. In fact, as a result of decades of censorship, they had grown to almost demand political significance from ‘serious’ work. They enjoyed searching for it, hungrily reading metaphors into scenes and digging for signs of dissent in the work- sometimes finding it where there was none intended! … I was actively feeding the Arab audience’s hunger for political statement and controversy. Indeed, audiences and critics in Tunisia immediately read the work as a piece of radical agit-prop.[19]

When The Arab League Hamlet was performed to an invited audience in London it was far less successful. In Al-Bassam’s view this was because while the Arab audiences were skilled in reading political meaning from dramatic texts, and saw the play as ‘a politically hyper-loaded piece that touched at the very heart of their feelings of despair in the political process’, the Western audience ‘regarded it as little more than a “clever” adaptation of Shakespeare’. ‘The political overtones did not translate’.[20]

In fact it is far more likely that English spectators encountered the ‘political overtones’ not as indecipherable but as all too familiar. A ‘clever adaptation of Shakespeare’ using modern dress and settings, insistently contemporary parallels, back-projected newsreel footage is something of an everyday occurrence. When Peter Culshaw saw The Arab League Hamlet he had no problem in reading this dimension off the very surface of the production:

The Hamlet I saw in London began with the characters seated behind desks as though at a summit, complete with name tags and headphones. This set the scene for an evening of power struggle, negotiations, compromise and tragic chaos. The overheated, incestuous atmosphere built up (‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’) with Claudius as a western puppet and the confused Hamlet outraged by the corruption.[21]

Al-Bassam was correct however in surmising that the production took the British audience into Shakespeare rather than into Arab culture and psychology: ‘I had wanted to put the English-speaking spectator inside the head of the Arab spectator in Kuwait and Tunisia …  I had wanted the English spectator to experience the same sense of strangeness in familiarity the Arab one had felt and, above all, the same degree of implication in the events presented to them on stage’.  But The Arab League Hamlet simply did not provide the Western spectator with a theatrical language powerful and suggestive enough to facilitate that cultural leap into such unfamiliar territory. ‘I was wrong’.[22]

The Al-Hamlet Summit was first performed in English as part of the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival, in August 2002. The newly-modernised English script, combined with the political assembly ‘summit’ setting devised for The Arab League Hamlet, played naturally into the category of political theatre. Al-Hamlet is if anything more overt in its agit-prop relevance and immediacy than its predecessors. Philip Culshaw said that it ‘makes explicit what was implicit’[23] in the Arab League Hamlet. Al-Bassam identified the play’s themes as ‘political corruption, the twisted relationship between willing puppets and their imperial masters, the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism; suicide as a desperate form of political self-expression’.[24] The parallel between Claudius and Saddam Hussein was further exaggerated; Ophelia is more closely linked to the Palestinian cause; and Hamlet himself more decisively characterised as an Islamic fundamentalist, goaded to violence by internal betrayal rather than by external aggression.

This emphasis on specific contemporary political issues offers the play to audiences as a piece of dramatic journalism, or a roman-a-clef from which obvious contemporary analogues to the Shakespearean characters can readily be identified. This is exactly how the play was read by many spectators:

Polonius is a devious spin-doctor, Hamlet moves from indecision to becoming a Bin Laden-type religious fanatic, while Ophelia ends up as a suicide bomber. CNN-type footage of burning oil wells adds to the claustrophobia.[25]

Hamlet becomes a religious extremist … Laertes joins the army … Ophelia is a suicide bomber …[26]

Although the primary historical context of the adaptation is that of the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, it was clearly also influenced by the atrocity of 9/11, and this helped Western viewers to find paradigms for understanding it: ‘the play rides on the aftermath of September 11 2001, and the impact it had on Arab and Western perceptions of one another’.[27]

It is abundantly clear that Al-Bassam was trying to do something more than this. These quotations suggest that Western spectators of The Al-Hamlet Summit are impressed primarily with the way in which the play brings Shakespeare up to date, providing dramatic analogues for contemporary archetypes or stereotypes (the Arab dictator, the Islamic fundamentalist, the suicide bomber) that are visible daily on every TV screen. But Al-Bassam wanted to move the spectator away from these temptingly easy analogies. The most substantial difference between The Arab League Hamlet and The Al-Hamlet Summit is that in the latter Al-Bassam deviated from the Shakespearean text and produced a wholly new script combining a much wider range of linguistic and theatrical registers. These naturally include echoes of Shakespearean verse and the modern colloquial language of a contemporary-oriented political theatre, but also new layers of poetic language derived from classical Arabic, including the Holy Quran, from contemporary Arabic poetry, and from a ‘cross-cultural’ poetic sensibility capable of interweaving all these strands and producing from them a new theatrical discourse.

These features are more noticeable in Al-Bassam’s most recent Shakespearean adaptation, his version of Richard III, which was premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford as part of the RSC’s ‘Complete Works’ project. The repertory consisted of ‘mainstream’ productions and parallel or alternative versions (‘responses’). An Arab Tragedy was billed as a ‘response’ to Michael Boyd’s production of Richard III. The play was performed in Arabic (the first play in Arabic to be produced by the RSC), with the English text projected onto screens as surtitles, and with some scenes spoken in English. This piece clearly has a longer development history that remains in process: it was played in Athens in May 2007 as part of the Athens Festival, and is scheduled to play at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and thereafter in Amsterdam.

Although the play is set in an unnamed ‘Gulf state’, Al-Bassam clearly did not want the play’s frame of reference restricted, as some reviewers suggested it was, to the Gulf monarchies.  Hence he broadens the scope of the piece to include the whole Middle East:

More generally, the modern Middle East, like so many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, offers a painful plethora of examples of how not to rule. Modern imperialism, tyranny, barbarism, oppression, plots, assassinations and civil wars are sadly becoming the rule not the exception in our region. The players in this grim game of politics, natural resources and strategic power are many, and like all the characters in Richard III, none are innocent; all have bloodied their hands.

At this point we are still inside the paradigm of agit-prop theatre occupied by the earlier adaptations. Here the landscape of the play is identical to the landscape of the modern Middle East, Shakespeare is our contemporary, and history is politics.

It is true that the play does to a certain degree depend on relatively simple parallels between Shakespearean situations and characters, and those to be found in Al-Bassam’s contemporary Middle East. This dimension was certainly the primary focus of the play’s British reception, intoxicated with orientalism:

It is as though the Swan Theatre has been put on a magic carpet and flown to Saudi Arabia. For the gripping two-hour direction of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s ‘Arabian’ account of Richard III, we see not dukes, earls and queens, but turbaned sheiks and women in burkas. We hear not alarums but strange beguiling ululations. Shakespeare’s language comes to as though through secret service intercept: in Arabic with surtitles.[28]

The same reviewer saw the piece as a play of ‘urgent topicality’, ‘reconceiving Shakespeare’s tragedy for the jihadi age’. Shakespeare’s play is  ripe for such analogies, replete as it is with arrests and executions, secret assassinations, political in-fighting and photo opportunities, hostage-taking, character assassination and show trials, religious hypocrisy, forced confessions, usurpation, invasion and civil war. All these aspects of the plot are here ‘Arabized’ and transferred to the play’s ‘unnamed oil-rich kingdom or emirate’.[29]

The staging accentuates these parallels further. Just as in Hamlet in Kuwait, projection screens were used to contextualise the action to the Gulf War, so in Arab Tragedy back-projected images flesh out the contingent context of despotism, military action, clandestine surveillance. ‘Grainy video footage of forced confessions and executions jostle for attention with swaying figures.’[30]  These ‘multimedia interventions’[31] were read primarily as documentary illustrations enforcing the contemporary parallels. Al-Bassam’s Buckingham is a double agent, secretly liaising with the Americans as he ostensibly supports Richard’s bid for the throne. The screens record his coded email communications. ‘Even as Buckingham does Richard’s bidding, he sends e-mail updates on the sly to the American ambassador, reporting on the latest political machinations’.[32] Richmond is portrayed as a ‘platitude-spouting Christian US general who at the play’s conclusion announces the installation of an interim government’.[33] Stability is already however threatened by insurgency:

Richmond is an American general who, chillingly, speaks the final words of the play in English, with the swaggering accent of the occupying army. The speech, ending with the words ‘God say Amen’, is meant to reassure. But even as he delivers it, a group of insurgents can be seen in the background, ready for a fight in the name of their own religion, ‘Allah-u akbar!’ they cry. ‘God is great!’[34]

At this final point of the drama, just before the theatre collapses its illusions and decants us back out into our own world, we are here transported from 1400 to 2003, from Bosworth Field to Afghanistan or Iraq in the embattled Middle East of the 21^st century.

I would nonetheless argue, and will seek to illustrate from some moments from the play, that the true achievement of Arab Tragedy lies less in its astute political parallels and historical comparisons, and more in the cross-cultural encounters it sets up between Western and Arab societies. The project was initially titled Baghdad Richard (tickets were sold for the play under that title) with the Gloucester-Saddam parallel clearly foregrounded. Al-Bassam changed the title in response to changing events, particularly the trial and execution of Saddam, but also out of a realisation that in this theatrical medium, oversimplification is a constant danger.

With the rapid change of events in the region and also as I delved more deeply into it to make that comparison really work, I reached the conclusion it would be selling both histories a bit short in trying to make a foolproof comparison between Richard III and the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein.[35]

The new title An Arab Tragedy suggests a broader territory, not just Iraq, and broaches wider issues of concern to the Gulf States and the Arab world in general. Al-Bassam came to see the play as initially about ‘constitutional crisis’ which is a ‘very current’ issue for the Gulf region. The production programme quotes a passage from 14^th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun on the dangers of dynastic succession in monarchy. The succession of a child protected by powerful ‘wazirs’ renders the state vulnerable, and this weakness is seen as a virtually incurable ‘disease of dynasty’.[36] In a programme note Al-Bassam underlines this parallel:

In this piece, I am using a foreign (English) history to explore contemporary political anxieties in the Gulf and Arab region. The monarchical system of rule that governs all the countries in the Arabian Peninsula (in which the reins of power are passed down through generations descended from an original founder) has proved itself to be a stable and durable form of governance. But, as recent events have shown, crises of succession present a constant threat of implosion to these monarchies. Richard III offers the model of a crisis of succession that turns into a nightmare.[37]

This theatrical ‘nightmare’ goes well beyond the interpolation of agit-prop relevance, and has the capacity to take the spectator deeper not only into Arab culture, but into territories of myth and communal emotion where trans-cultural rapprochements can more effectively take place.

Shakespeare’s Act 1 scene IV is the long scene of Clarence’s murder. Clarence tells Brakenbury of the dream which anticipates his assassination. In the dream Clarence finds himself in the underworld, and is rebuked by the ghosts of his victims for his crimes of perjury and murder. The murderers then enter and engage in some clowning before falling to their task. Clarence cannot believe that Edward would wish him killed, protests his innocence and appeals to shared Christian values:

I charge you, as you hope to have redemption

By Christ’s dear blood shed for our grievous sins,

That you depart, and lay no hands on me.

There follows an energetic debate on the authority of kingship vis-a-vis God’s law; whether or not the guilty have any rights to mercy; the proper punishments for perjury and murder. Eventually the murderers confide in Clarence the truth that they act for Gloster. He pleads for his life, and they kill him by beating him and drowning him in the wine-butt.

Al-Bassam concentrates this whole sequence down to this:

– I swear there is no God but Allah.
God forgive my sins.

…In God’s name what art thou?

– A man as you are.

– If you be hired for money go back again and I will send you to my brother Gloucester…

…He shall reward you better for my life than the King does for news of my death.

– You are deceived, he hates you.
– Do not slander him.
He is kind and merciful.

– Merciful as rain on mud huts. He sent me to slaughter you. Pray now for you must die.

– Dare you counsel me to pray to God yet would war with God by murdering me?..

…He who kills without due reason, it is as though he kills the whole of humanity (Q.);
– Pray!

– And do not shed blood that is sacred by Allah’s law (Q.);
– Pray!

– Al Rawandi in the sources says: beware of shedding innocent blood-
– Pray!

– Pray! (ATS, p. 7)

Here Clarence is presented as a devout Muslim who quotes the Holy Quran and illustrations from Islamic scholarship against unlawful killing and the violation of innocence. Not surprisingly there is no wine-butt: instead Clarence is drowned in the sacred water he has used to perform his ritual ablutions. Simultaneously the musical accompaniment deploys an old Gulf sea-song, thus invoking poetic associations of dreaming and drowning.

Al-Bassam has moved the narrative of Clarence’s dream from this scene to an earlier scene with Richard. In the murder scene there is no detailed account of Clarence’s past, or the role he has played in previous political machinations: he seems an ordinary pious man who is conscious of his sins, and prays for forgiveness.  His appeal to his murderers is articulated in terms of the Islamic values they share, just as, in Shakespeare, Clarence appeals for mercy through the blood of Christ.[38] The Quaranic quotations used by Clarence speak out against the murder of innocence, and the reference to ‘the shedding of innocent blood’ invokes the tradition of Ibrahim and Mohammad, the young sons of Muslim and the descendents of the Prophet, who were assassinated in a story that forms a direct and detailed parallel to the story of the Princes in the Tower.[39] Thus Clarence as victim is shifted closer in this version to the massacre of the innocents later practised on young Edward and Richard.[40]

In Shakespeare’s scene, Clarence’s Christian language is undermined by the murderers’ indictment of his crimes. Here however the issue is not Clarence’s guilt – for who is guiltless? – but the moral atrocity of assassination itself. The murderers instruct him to pray, although his prayers clamour out against their actions. They decline to enter any kind of religious debate with him, thus letting the stark moral beauty and clarity of the Quranic injunctions stand in clear contrast to the act of butchery perpetrated by those who purport to share their victim’s faith. This is more than a substitution of an Islamic for a Christian frame of reference. This is an attempt to draw the spectator inside an engaged but critical perspective on Islam and the violence that shadows it.

Later in the equivalent of Shakespeare’s 4.3, in which Tyrrel describes his murder of the princes, we are presented again with the immense moral power of religious taboo, and the strength required to betray it:

– I swear I turned back twice.
But he put out his hand. The Book was on the pillow…

…“No!” I said. It’s the Quran. It’s haram. Can’t do it. Haram…

…Then one of them opened his eyes: a boy. Same age as my own boy.
Haram…

… God, what did you make me of ? I killed my friend, then these children…

…Filthy dirty scab, rotten useless chump…

…It was not me: it was
the Devil. Not me: the Devil put out his hand.

…Damn you and damn who asked for your love. Damn lovers that seek only pain!..

…My crime in this life was placing you in my heart. To love one like you is to slash open my veins. (ATS, p. 21)

Here it is Catesby, no stranger to violence, who undertakes the murder on Richard’s behalf. In Shakespeare on the pillow there lies a ‘book of prayers’, here replaced by the Holy Quran. The sight of the text forces Catesby to realise that he is about to commit an unspeakable crime, ‘Haram’. The Arabic word ‘haram’ can mean ‘forbidden’ or ‘sacred’. It is used for example of sanctuaries and holy places such as the Musjid-al-Haram at Mecca, an inviolable sacred space. Catesby rehearses in Islamic language and terminology the power of the sacred law that forbids the desecration of innocence; the immense struggle of the man who seeks to betray the law; and the desperate invocation of a diabolical power to explain how such acts can be committed. The speech ends by quoting a traditional Arab lament which sings of the hopelessness of love, the bitter disenchantment of a betrayed loyalty.

My final illustration is from the conclusion to Arab Tragedy, which aims for effects quite different from those of the source text. Just as the play opened by countermanding conventional expectations of Richard’s famous soliloquy, so here there is no trace of the scene in Richard’s camp on the night before Bosworth: no ghosts of the slain returning to haunt him, no lights burning blue, no self-pitying exhortations (to the manifest disappointment of some spectators). The equivalent of Richard’s last Shakespearean soliloquy is this one-ended telephone conversation Richard conducts with the American Embassy:

– [Prayer] Please Allah forgive my deepest blackest sins, my crimes. My soul this night is heavy, my life in your hands…

– [Telephone] Will the Ambassador not speak to me? I have a conscience I want to talk to him about,…

…it’s something he should understand being an enlightened man of learning!..

…Where can I take this stray dog of mine? Where can I kennel it? If my dog bites you Ambassador…

…it will infect you and your masters, show you in the filth I know you!..

…I have studied how to plant bombs in the bowels of your democracies- your hands are not clean, sir, I will unveil your complicity!..

…Neither are my hands clean but I don’t boast otherwise you two-faced hypocrite democrat dog!..

…Now be careful what you say Ambassador you’re in my country. Oh really? Well, I have firing squads in the Hague too!. (ATS, p. 24)

Again the language of Islamic prayer provides the discourse for Richard’s expression, whether genuine or merely conventional, of guilt.[41] If he genuinely does want to discuss his guilt with the Ambassador, the intention very soon evaporates as Richard collapses from one raging diatribe into another. The self-searching renaissance hero-villain is replaced here by the modern megalomaniac despot, psychotically convinced of his power, unscrupulous in the pursuit of his will, ruthless in meeting opposition. There can be no sympathy for such a figure, and Al-Bassam has stated that he deliberately omitted Richard’s final soliloquy because in this context he ‘questioned the value of pity’.[42] The subsequent entry of Margaret, leading a procession of the dead, creates what Al-Bassam calls a ‘religious-political-historical montage’, underscored by Catesby’s recited prayers, which draw on litanies from both the Shia and Sunni traditions.[43]

Having defeated expectation so many times, Al-Bassam finally obliges by providing Richard with the ‘horse’ for which he would exchange his kingdom. On stage this is a strange contraption, part gym equipment and part physiotherapy apparatus, that is brought in disguised and then revealed when required. Richard mounts it and tries to flog the machine into action, brandishing the scimitar:

– What’s this horse called?
– “Al-Umma”.

– “Al Umma”! let me ride you! O my battle of Badr! … Victory sits on our helms. (ATS, p. 25)

‘Al-Umma’ is ‘the nation of believers’, the people considered as a belief community. The word is encountered widely in Arab culture, in political language (the Kuwaiti parliament is called ‘Majlis-al-Umma’), in the press, where it is the title of several newspapers, or as the name of an Islamic fundamentalist group.  Richard is offering himself as the leader of an Arab Islamic nationalism. The battle he names, Badr (625) is a great victory from the history of militant Islam. When Richard III’s iconic lines finally arrive, they can be read as the echo of an ancient and suicidal heroism that can still be invoked in the present:

…A horse! A horse!
My kingdom for a horse! (ATS, p. 25)

But the heroism is undermined by the absurdity of the stage image, Richard flailing clumsily around on a mechanical horse that is going nowhere except  in circles.

In the adaptation text (ATT), Richard used the name of another battle, Qadisya (636) in which the Muslims defeated the Persians.  Al-Bassam dropped this reference, since to Arab spectators it would tie Richard too closely to Saddam Hussein (Saddam invoked this historical exemplar in the course of his war against Iran of 1980-8, known as the Qādisiyyat Saddām). ‘Badr’, the battle of 625 in which a small Muslim force defeated the much larger army of the Meccans, also invokes Saddam, but with deeper cross-cultural reverberations and sharper ironies. The eighth sura of the Holy Quran represents the Battle of Badr as clear proof of God’s favour to believers. The chapter is called Al-Anfal, ‘The Spoils’.[44] Saddam used the title Al-Anfal as the code name for his notorious campaign against peshmerga rebels and Kurds between 1986 and 1989, the campaign in which chemical weapons were used against civilians. Saddam’s cousin ‘Chemical Ali’ was sentenced to death on charges including these atrocities.

Hence the play’s emphasis shifts from any notion of Richard as victim, to the list of martyrs with which the play closes. This list, which fades out as if it could go on indefinitely, is the equivalent of a Shakespearean list of battlefield slain, but brings together Arab martyrs past and present, from the dawn of Islam to today; brings together soldiers, writers, thinkers, freedom fighters of all descriptions, and victims of may different regimes. Their names echo into silence as the territory of the stage splits into civil war between occupying power and insurgent militia.

These examples should help to further the argument that although Al-Bassam’s adaptations of Shakespeare clearly are a form of political theatre, and offer themselves to be read as such, they are not restricted to this cultural register. The works aim to produce ‘a richly suggestive theatrical experience, not a piece of agit-prop’.[45] Political parallels and historical comparisons are certainly drawn, but not in any simplistic or reductive way. Rather he attempts to ‘put contemporary figures in the political landscape, within the fabric of another world, a Shakespearean world, and thereby open up a space for dissent, or a space for another kind of annotation’.[46] The Shakespearean dimension is there to provide a dramatic space in which contemporary events can be re-projected with something like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, so that the present condition is estranged rather than simply recognised. ‘Current political events – and our perceptions of them – hang like a misty landscape, half-perceived, in the backdrop of the play’.[47] Al-Bassam wants his Western spectators to think again about contemporary political stereotypes rather than merely to identify (and implicitly endorse) them.

In making theatre in the Arab world and presenting it to the West (as is the case in this production) I am very conscious of not using theatre to make binary moral statements (we are right: you are wrong) as this process merely confirms prejudices and makes matters worse. I have tried to level the earth to make a space for this text and aspects of the contemporary Arab world to meet and make sense of each other.

The dramatist was also obviously steering a difficult course among a wide range of extreme and moderate opinions on the current condition of the Middle East. His focus is on the possibilities for cross-cultural linguistic and theatrical encounters, and for enhanced understanding between divided communities.

I think that there are sadly few Arab voices that are able to speak to Western audiences outside of a political or religious context and in that sense one has to find a way to steer between ideological cliché and antagonism but also to use those elements – because that’s what most people are familiar with – to open up new space for dialogue and meeting.[48]

The last word belongs to the actor who played Richard in the production, Syrian Fayez Kazak, who told an interviewer:

Whenever I sing you my song, and you sing me your song, then we become relatives on this earth. Otherwise we will be enemies.[49]

The last word belongs to the actor who played Richard in the production, Syrian Fayez Kazak, who told an interviewer:

Whenever I sing you my song, and you sing me your song, then we become relatives on this earth. Otherwise we will be enemies.[50]

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