The New York Times' Baghdad bureau has filed a sympathetic piece on Monadhil Daood's Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad. It's in the "Mideast" section rather than on the arts page (surprise), so don't expect a lot of detail about the scenography or performances, but they do have some interesting interviews with audience members, actors, and Monadhil and Deborah Shaw. And the representativeness angle is played up:
“Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad’s” story line of a doomed cross-sectarian love affair manages to touch on nearly every element of the recent collective Iraqi experience.
In an interesting homage to the Iraqi Shakespeare tradition, Monadhil has cast 82-year-old Sami Abdel Hamid (MV 1965, Hamlet Arabian-Style 1973, MND and much else besides) in the role, fittingly, of a history teacher. Look forward to seeing the man in person in Stratford. He last appeared in the news ten years ago, I believe, when he directed the theatrical adaptation of Saddam Hussein's first novel, Zabiba and the King. (not the Sacha Baron Cohen version). One of those complicated intellectuals who played the difficult, not wholeheartedly admirable game of surviving and continuing to produce art under a dictatorship that killed or exiled many of their colleagues and friends.
Monadhil himself never worked under Saddam; he did his PhD (on ta'ziya theatre) in St. Petersburg and has lived in Sweden and Syria.
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