Shakespeare in the Arab World

Syrian protesters tap into English theatre tradition

2012-01-23T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Guardian finds this English-language sign held up by in Kafranbel, Syria, to be "cryptic." Why?

(Gotta love the different colored ink on "ASSad," too.)

Shakespeare at the Alwiya Club - a bygone Baghdad era

2011-12-05T23:54:00.000-08:00

My colleague Kecia Ali alerted me to this beautiful reminiscence by Abdul Sattar Jawad, an Iraqi literature scholar who was forced to flee Baghdad in 2005. Titled "Shakespeare in Baghdad," it just appeared in Duke University's student paper, The Chronicle.

There are some spiky details under the surface of the piece. For instance, "Iraq" functions as a metonym for everything in the Arab world (just as "Egypt" does for Egyptian intellectuals), including a late 19th c adaptation of Romeo and Juliet adapted by a Lebanese migrant for performance in Cairo. Also there is curiously no mention of the great Palestinian-Iraqi poet-novelist-critic-translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who did so much for Arabic reception of Shakespeare (and of Abdul Sattar Jawad's other great love, T.S. Eliot). But who wants to quibble? The piece is a lovely evocation of a cosmopolitan Baghdad paradise very similar to Jabra's and now, unfortunately, lost for the forseeable future.
Here's the opening:

Shakespeare in Baghdad

It has been nearly thirty years since I drove to Oxford to visit its celebrated university and pay tribute to Shakespeare’s mausoleum in Stratford-upon-Avon in the heart of England. I was greeted in what seemed unthinkable: “Hey Sheikh Zbair, how’d you do?”
It was really a surprise to me although I am well aware of the Iraqi myth alleging that William Shakespeare is an Iraqi from Zubair, an Iraqi city bordering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This myth was disseminated by Iraqi scholar and poet Safa Khulusi, who did his Ph.D. at London University in the 1940’s and then settled in Oxford as Chair of Islamic Studies. Of course this funny theory was very popular among Iraqis from different walks of life, who loved Shakespeare through his plays and poems taught at high schools and colleges.
Similarly, when I first came to Duke in 2005, Bruce Lawrence, professor emeritus of religion, extended his hand to me at the John Hope Franklin Center and said: “Welcome Sheikh Zbair.” From that time I realized that the Iraqi myth had crossed the Atlantic and become a source of fun, if not laughter. To the Iraqis and Arabs, Old Will is perceived as a bringer of much delight and gladness to mankind and the only author read or staged everywhere. He is, as Harold Bloom, one of America’s leading critics, said, an international possession transcending nations, languages and professions. Through invention and originality Shakespeare has notched the highest popularity and survived migration from country to country.
Old Will always manifests himself as a force that continues to activate the potential of other languages, in terms of grammar, vocabulary, register, rhythm and tone. In Iraq, Shakespeare was received as the most popular playwright and poet who taught us how to understand the human nature. His plays were performed even in the Iraqi vernacular: Othello retrieved his Arabic name Utail, Iago was Arabized into Yaccoob and Romeo and Juliet took a new title, Martyrs of Love, to attract public attention and boost the box office.
Read the whole thing...

Or not to be original

2011-12-05T02:27:00.001-08:00

In the lead-up to last week's polls in Egypt, not one but two English-language newspapers, AMAY and Ahram Online, ran the headline "To Vote or Not to Vote?" (Thanks, Amy Motlagh.)

Fahmi Al-Kholi's post-Camp-David "Merchant of Venice"

2011-12-05T01:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, to be naughty, before the Arab Spring, a reader would ask me: "It's all very well what the Arabs have done with Hamlet. But what do they do with The Merchant of Venice?" I have generally avoided focusing on this question; it's not my favorite Shakespeare play anyway.
And yet: Could it be the case that Arab theatre's response to the Camp David Accords challenges my basic historical claim that there was no space for "real" (i.e., aspiring to have an effect on policy) political theatre after about 1976?
I met last night with the Cairo-based theatre director Fahmi El-Kholi, whose production of Shakespeare in Ataba I had written about in my book. Just wanted to (belatedly) check some hunches on scenography, allegory, and reception. But before I know it, he launches into a description of a Merchant of Venice production he directed at Cairo University in 1978, right after the Camp David Accords, and revised/reprised in 1979-80 with amateur actors at the Workers' Theatre at the Nasr Automobile Company. Recall the context: huge demonstrations against Sadat, and resolutions by most of the relevant professional organizations (Writers' Union, Cinema Union, Musicians' Union, Theatre Makers' Union) to condemn and oppose any sort of "normalization" effort that would involve cultural interaction with the Zionist Entity. Anyway, El-Kholi said it enjoyed an unbelievably warm reception, sliding past (probably sympathetic) censors and inspiring audience members to come see it with Palestinian flags on their lapels and keffiyyehs on their heads.
His description included:

Modern dress; Shylock, in black shirtsleeves "like an accountant or merchant" carried a calculator and used it to sell weapons to a long line of buyers from different nationalities. Later he would calculate the pound of flesh which was, of course, a slice of land.
The set was a bare stage punctuated by two crosses: one placed horizontally/diagonally (rising at a slight angle) from downstage to upstage; the second vertical, upstage, made of olive branches with a Palestinian keffiyyeh on top where the crown of thorns would be. At crucial moments in the play the keffiyyeh would start to drip little drops of blood thanks to a specially attached mechanism. Because the Palestinians, you see, were crucified on the olive branches of the peace accord.
The actor playing "the big brother" Antonio impersonated the speech patterns of Nasser in Act I, then (after N's death) acquired a pipe and glasses to become Sadat in Act II.
A young woman called Palestine, bleeding and fleeing her captors in a torn white dress, appealed for help to her fiance Yasser (Arafat), then to her big brother (Egypt). They ultimately failed to help her.
Shakespeare's text (in translation) was used "word for word," except that loaded translations were chosen for certain key terms. E.g., Shylock's "bond" became اتفاق, which means "agreement" or (the term used for Camp David) "accord."
Shylock became, in the 1979-80 restaging, Shylock-Yahu in honor of (then also) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahyu.
In the 1979-80 workers' restaging, the set included the dome of al-Aqsa mosque, with 14 men chained to it by ropes coming off different sides. (Ropes are a recurring element in El-Kholi's scenography.) The ropes acted mainly as leashes (El-Kholi described them as "like umbilical cords"), but at the crucial moment (at the end, when the Arab world rises) were activated to allow the men to defeat Shylock. Most of Shakespeare's script was dumped, leaving only the scene of Antonio's deal with Shylock and the trial scene. Other parts of the script were taken from public recordings of UN and Arab summit meetings, historical documents, and Sadat's famous speeches leading up to his peace initiative. At other times, quotes from the Israeli news media and Israeli leaders' speeches were reproduced by actors dressed as rabbis, sitting on onstage toilets, evidently suffering from diarrhea, pulling the chain after every one-liner. In both productions the trial scene was played as a UN meeting, with the Duke a figure for the UN Secretary-General.
Oh, and did I mention that the play went all the way back to 1948? That was the scene with the torn white dress. The 1967 defeat was figured as all the 14 men lying around sleeping with model planes balanced on trays on their bellies; Shylock fished for these planes with a fishing rod, and when he caught one, it blew up. The 1973 "victory" was figured too.
"And I forgot to tell you," El-Kholi said. "I opened the play with a somewhat flashy opening scene. It was in Damascus, and a Muslim man disappeared, and a small Christian boy disappeared. This actually happened. And it was found that..." The scene he described was an enactment of the "blood libel" myth of Jews grinding up Christian boys to enrich their Passover matzoh (he called it "fateera"): the victims were hung upside down, dripping the same small red drops of stage blood, while a group of rabbis performed some kneading motions to the tune of (he hummed it for me) Hatikva. The matzoh they ate was, of course, supposed to represent the Arab lands, "from the Nile to the Euphrates." El-Kholi then added, unprompted (I wasn't even going to get into it - where would you start?): "Oh but we have no problem with Jews. Everything was fine before 1948. There were Jewish families in Egypt, Jewish businesses, department stores, everything."
What about censorship, I asked? Surely this blood libel scene would have violated two of the major state censorship taboos (politics and religion), especially in the volatile aftermath of the peace accords? Well, he said, we took out the scene in the script shown to the censors, and then we reinserted it for the performance.

All this left me, as a scholar of theatre, with only one question: with so much strong imagery available, why enlist Shakespeare at all? I asked him, and he didn't really give an answer. Not a ticket past the censors. Not high-cultural cred for a sketchy contemporary message. (In fact I think it was both those things. Despite every expectation that the audience and even the actors would not know Shakespeare's text, the big-name pedigree would impress them.) Fahmi El-Kholi said only: "Well, Shylock is generally associated with Israel, with Zionism, with the pound of flesh being the slice of Arab land." He and I were both able to cite several plays along these lines, both by older (Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Shylock al-Jadid) and by younger (Ibrahim Hamada, Ratl al-Ard) playwrights.

And then the conversation moved on to other things. Have you seen his latest Shakespeare effort, Measure for Measure, produced in Doha in 2006? Reviews here and here. Or what about Jerusalem Will Not Fall, an elaborate agit-prop historical starring Nur El-Sherif, in 2002? El-Kholi was also honored with this year's State Distinction Award in the Arts in a surreal mid-revolution awards ceremony in July.
El-Kholi's current projects? Either a play called Hulagu about the U.S. occupation of Iraq ("as soon as I can find a good person who will fund it" - sounds like this one has been on the drawing board for some years now) or, responding more immediately to the 2011 Egyptian "revolution" and its uncertain aftermath, a revival of Salah Abdel Sabur's play Leila and the Madman (1970).

"Shakespeare, friend of Arab democracy"

2011-11-28T04:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all who helped organize or who attended my recent talks at Cairo U, Ayn Shams (Al-Alsun and Drama Dept), and/or AUC. It was humbling and mind-sharpening to do them in light of everything that was happening in Cairo. And is still happening. Happy (to the limited extent possible) Election Day!
Thanks also to Sameh Fekry Hanna from whose dissertation I lifted the 1912 image at left: "Shakespeare, the democratic English dramatic poet."
One more talk coming up at Helwan U on Dec 8.

Gary Wills on Shakespeare and Verdi

2011-11-07T11:57:00.000-08:00

No Arab connection per se, and kind of unexpected to find Wills (brilliant polymath though he is) writing about this, but check out this great NYRB piece on the authorship of Shakespeare and Verdi, and the day-to-day theatrical work that was inseperable from it in both men's lives. Theatre shaped by actual conditions: not only sponsorship but available talent! What a great idea. (And what a frequent reality in Arab companies as well.)
Of course Verdi -- whose work inaugurated Khedive Ismail's opera house -- was an even earlier and more decisive influence in Arab theatre than Shakespeare has been.

Chutzpah

2011-11-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

Anyone for a night at the movies? Films about bloody dictators, perhaps?
As government troops fire on Eid demonstrators in cities including Hama and Homs, a Syrian newspaper announces a film festival in Damascus. To wit: a festival will be held November 13-16 at the Al-Asad House for Arts and Culture, "under the patronage of Minister of Culture [and one-time respected playwright] Riad Ismat," devoted to the films of Shakespeare. The newspaper notes that hundreds of Shakespeare-based films have been made, "among the most prominent of which are Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth."

Qaddafi as Macbeth one last time

2011-10-21T19:42:00.000-07:00

Robert Worth in the NYT:

That is what made the Libyan revolt such a riveting spectacle: unlike the other embattled Arab Spring dictators, Qaddafi showed no doubt, no instinct for compromise and self-preservation. He never really tried to stave off the end with half-hearted “reforms.” He seemed to know he was plunging himself and Libya down a tragic path, and, like Macbeth, to embrace it. Perhaps he understood that he had gone “so far in blood” that there was no turning back. In retrospect, his whole 42-year reign seemed to follow an inexorable arc toward ruin. From the handsome young revolutionary who inspired such hope in his people he transformed into the drugged, puffy-faced madman howling for slaughter in the streets of his own cities. Many Libyans told me they believed Qaddafi used black magic to keep himself in power for so long. I was almost tempted to believe it. I found Chadian witchcraft amulets in some of the weapons depots abandoned by his loyalists. Before his death, he behaved like someone who had sold his soul to the devil, and, like Faust, was waiting to be dragged down to Hell.

Video of our conversation at BU

2011-10-16T05:20:00.000-07:00

BU's media services people used a new program called Echo 360 to capture the conversation in Boston last Wednesday between Sulayman Al-Bassam, Graham Holderness, and me. Watch it here: : http://echo360.bu.edu:8081/ess/echo/presentation/7a568a3f-fce4-45ba-b2a1-9c119488e55e
Apologies for the weird focus on the video - I think everyone is still getting the hang of the new technology.

Preview - Speaker's Progress in Boston

2011-10-12T03:44:00.000-07:00

"How do you make a play about an abstract idea like change?" Sulayman Al-Bassam speaks to the Boston Globe.

Judging by the dress rehearsal I saw last night, there are still some technical things to be ironed out before tonight's opening (never mind the idea of change - the real issue is that these guys are scrambling for provisional closure, editing to the last minute!), some meanings to be nailed down, but the play has an amazing energy.

Boston people: come see the show and any of the myriad post-show or para-show events at ArtsEmerson! Reminder: you can also see Sulayman and me in discussion with Graham Holderness at BU this afternoon, 12-2.

Coverage of Al-Bassam's Speaker's Progress in New York

2011-10-11T00:04:00.000-07:00

Very favorable New York Times review of the New York performance of The Speaker's Progress at BAM last week; Al-Bassam's own "wonderfully dry performance" gets special praise. In Richard III he played an implausibly slick and charming U.S. Ambassador (later edited out to make room for Mister Richmond in the US performances); now he has switched sides, playing an Arab director and performing in Arabic (at least in the draft of the script I saw).

A brief write-up an audio interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS' NewsHour, who also did a long segment on Al-Bassam when his Richard III: An Arab Tragedy played Washington and New York in 2009. The first segment's headline had Al-Bassam "take inspiration" from Shakespeare; the current one has him "taking inspiration" from the Arab Spring. And there is something to this: it does seem that the source text Twelfth Night plays a relatively insignificant role in the logic of Al-Bassam's new play -- it could have been any other play, or even another type of iconic performance. Whereas his Hamlet was really a Hamlet. This is not a criticism.

These things are being posted on SABAB Theatre's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/groups/sababtheatre/

Al-Bassam at BU

2011-10-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

Excited that this informal event at BU is actually happening!

The “Arab Shakespeare Trilogy”:

Staging a Region in Tumult, 2002-2011

A conversation with dramatic examples:

Kuwaiti theatre director Sulayman Al-Bassam

and Prof. Margaret Litvin (MLCL)

Born in Kuwait and educated in Britain, Sulayman Al-Bassam founded the Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre (SABAB) in Kuwait in 2002. He has directed his Shakespeare adaptations on four continents, including at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Kennedy Center, and BAM. SABAB productions are characterized by a radical approach to text, bold production styles, and playful, provocative combinaons of content and form. The Speaker’s Progress, the final play of Al-Bassam’s “Arab Shakespeare Trilogy,” opens at ArtsEmerson in Boston on October 12.

Wednesday, October 12, 12-2pm

The Castle, 225 Bay State Road

Lunch will be served before and during the talk

Sponsored by the Peter Paul Development Professorship, the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College

Arabic review of "Tempest" in Aida Camp...

2011-10-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

...in Al-Bayan, online here.

Shakespeare on Palestine on Fox News

2011-09-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a totally unreadable piece on the Fox News web site by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center published in the runup to Mahmoud Abbas' speech at the United Nations. Cooper recycles all the old cliches - "backed by Iran," "they teach their children to hate," etc. As though it were a matter of Palestinians recognizing Israelis' rights! Of course no such screed would be complete without an appeal to Shakespeare (the only universally agreed-upon scripture we've got on this planet) to buttress the opinionator's authority. In this case, he invokes both Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

In Shakespeare’s words, “The fault lies not in our stars, but ourselves.” The Palestinians might as well be relying on astrology rather than looking in their cracked national mirror.
Despite their attempted charade at “unity” by Fatah and the Hamas a few months ago, the Palestinians (like Hamlet) are fatally unable to make up their minds. There are two Palestinian presidents, two prime ministers, and a legislature that neither meets nor passes laws.

As it happens, the context is interesting. Julius Caesar and Hamlet were written one after the other, and what is striking (as I learned from David Bromwich in his excellent Yale seminar on "Political Shakespeare") is the similarity between the two plays. The sulky insurgents Brutus and Hamlet, at varying speeds, both "make up their minds" to - hello, Rabbi Cooper! - take up arms against a corrupt, unaccountable, increasingly arrogant autocrat. Here's the speech spoken by Cassius in Julius Caesar 1.2:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Both plays, alas, end with the death of the hero and various other corpses littering the stage as well. So I'm not endorsing that approach. I just want to point out that the general intellectual laziness of rote-Zionist discourse extends to its sloppy citation of Shakespeare.

Al-Bassam's "Speaker's Progress" in Beirut

2011-09-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

Sympathetic review of The Speaker's Progress in The Daily Star suggests that the overall design works but there are still some surtitle glitches to be ironed out. I'm not surprised, since Sulayman Al-Bassam, a compulsive editor and re-editor, was probably tinkering with the script until ten minutes before the curtain went up.

...the surtitles are projected above and to the back of the stage. This is a problem as one cannot possibly simultaneously read the translation and observe the on-stage action. Forsaking either diminishes the viewer’s experience of the performance, because the strength, wit and entertainment of this play definitely lie in its combination of text, acting and set design.
The envoys commence the performance nervously, on a stage surrounded by bureaucratic apparatus and presided over by The Speaker and a censor who sounds an alarm whenever dialogue is improvised or the action drifts from its state-sanctioned course.
A meter stick is amusingly employed to ensure that the official 90-centimeter distance is maintained between male and female players at all times.
As the play progresses, the spirit of the theater begins to take over. Digressions from the approved performance increase in regularity. The set, lighting and costumes evolve from bleak greys, whites and blacks to colorful oranges, reds and yellows. Eventually the cry rises, in English, “Defect!”
While the momentum is building, alas, the surtitles are falling apart. As they lapse several lines behind the onstage dialogue, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand who is saying what, especially when there are more than two members of the 10-man cast engaged in conversation. It becomes frustrating.
Meanwhile the progressively absurdist nature of what’s happening beneath the translation also grows challenging to follow.

Ironically, Beirut may be a less welcoming audience for this show than Boston and New York (coming up next month!). In Lebanon, from what I gathered last May, no one wants to hear too much about the Arab Spring. Further, Al-Bassam doesn't get any "exoticity discount" (do you know what I mean?) for directing a show in Arabic. And he has discovered before (with an ill-fated musical Tartuffe adaptation that was cleverly intended for Gulfi audiences who were summering in Lebanon but that ended up playing instead for sophisticated Beirutis, who were underwhelmed) that it can be a tough market to gauge.

The Tempest performed in Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem...

2011-09-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

...in English, by a British company called Jericho House Theatre.

The Independent's coverage reproduces the familiar trope of third-world and especially non-Anglophone audiences as Shakespearean "groundlings."

True there were no mobile phones, a few of which trilled during the performance, in Shakespeare's time. But close your eyes and you could just about imagine that the children sucking ice lollies running up and down the steps of the Aida refugee camp's open-air auditorium, were behaving much as the Globe's younger groundlings would have done four centuries ago.

Is this Prospero in the photo above, dressed as an English colonial gentleman? The Independent (which covers the performance as an event, not a show) does not say. But it seems the director, unsurprisingly, has some political ideas about the play and its relevance to the situation in Aida:

For Jonathan Holmes, The Tempest has a particular relevance to the Middle East. He is careful not to suggest any exact parallels. But without repeating a fashionable "post-colonial" reading of Caliban as the rebellious, and Ariel as the more collaborative victim of exploiters from outside, he believes the play, set somewhere between Western Europe and the Levant, "becomes a contest for territory between people of different cultures, and between people of the same culture. Shakespeare uses this to explore different systems and ideas of political resistance."

Aida camp is literally right under Israel's separation wall. I haven't visited, but my good friends Amahl and Nidal made a very cool documentary about it. You can hear them on NPR, too -- click here and scroll down to July 7.

Titus Andronicus and 9/11

2011-09-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

This is not about the Arab world per se, but... there's a fine article by Nick Schifrin in Foreign Policy about revenge-seeking and its consequences. Framed with David Scott Kastan on Titus Andronicus. Nicely titled "Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar." (Thanks to my friend Justin for sharing.)

Not all the world is a stage...

2011-09-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

The sign reads: "A Living Egypt is Not a Play"

(In Arabic the two expressions, "living Egypt" and "theatre play," differ by just one letter.)

Tahrir graffiti

2011-09-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Among many, many, graffiti in Tahrir today. Most were in Arabic and were much more specific. But still, here's the "to be or not to be" thing. Look at the very top in the center.

A Tunisian-themed Macbeth

2011-09-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my friend Scott Newstock for alerting me to this Tunisian-themed Macbeth added to the roster of the global Shakespeare festival on the occasion of the 2012 Olympics:

Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History – Artistes, Producteurs, Associes from Tunisia combine Shakespeare with film and reportage (LIFT at London's Riverside Studios, Northern Stage – in Arabic with English surtitles).

There are not a lot of Arabic productions of Macbeth, for whatever reason, and even fewer adaptations. (Low prestige? High censorship?) But the time may be ripe for a production keyed to ousted Tunisian president Zine el Abdine Ben Ali and his widely reviled wife Leila.

"Shakespeare After 9/11" issue of Shakespeare Yearbook finally out

2011-09-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

A lot of events, some very sad, intervened to delay this issue. But at least the heroic editors got it out in time for the tenth anniversary!
http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=8357&pc=9
I have an article in here about Sulayman Al-Bassam, complete critical history of his work up to and including the Richard III project.

BAM Presents The Speaker's Progress, 10/6-8

2011-08-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

Go see this, y'all! Go on the night when my friend (and Paris Review poetry editor) Robyn Creswell is doing the post-show talkback. Here's Al-Bassam's latest (I hope!) synopsis:

BAM Presents THE SPEAKER'S PROGRESS, 10/6-8

A condemned 1960s staging of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night has become the focal point for political resistance blogs and underground social network movements. The state, eager to suppress this dangerous mixture of nostalgia and dissent, commissions The Speaker, a once-radical theater producer now turned regime apologist, to mount a forensic reconstruction and public denunciation of the work. As The Speaker and his group of nonacting volunteers delve deeper into the "reconstruction" they find themselves increasingly engaged with the material they are supposed to be condemning. They soon discover-in the act of performance and the growing participation of their audience-a solidarity that transforms the gathering itself into an unequivocal act of defiance towards the state.

The Speaker's Progress is the final part of writer, director, and performer Sulayman Al- Bassam's Arab Shakespeare Trilogy; the second, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, was presented at BAM's Muslim Voices festival (Spring 2009). Created along with a core team of actors and artists from across the Arab world and Europe, this unique body of work charts a decade of Arab and Western political and social upheaval following the events of 9/11 to the current leaps for reform made by millions across the region.

Saadi Youssef poem: Elsinore, Hamlet's Castle

2011-08-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

Elsinore, Hamlet's castle
The trench with green water
is criss-crossed by twigs and birds,
by the shoes of tourists
and the ghosts of shipwrecked sailors . . .
I cross it too
feeling the moat's wooden boards,
soft, and water-logged.
Like blood within blood,
the castle resides within itself.
But now you will not caress a wooden board
or a stone, you will not enter history
to enjoy the paintings exhibited in the hall
while you listen to the
swashing sea.
Now you will withdraw into yourself
like a snail into its shell.
You will listen to footfalls in a distant night.
To stifled breath, to the staircase
rising toward the questions.
So, then, beware!
Translated by Sargon Boulus. Reprinted from Banipal No 15/16. With thanks to the Arabic Literature (in English Translation) blog.

ٍSee also Youssef's very long poem "Hamlet's Balcony" - شرفة هاملت - (in Arabic).

Adonis' translation of Hamlet - produced in Baalbek, 1967

2011-08-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know anything about this production? I was just working on a reference book entry on Arabic Hamlet and came across some remarkable photos from it in an an old article by Suheil Bushrui (Middle East Forum, Spring 1971, pp. 54-64).

The production is mentioned on the festival web site (click on 1967), but no detail or photo is given. Here's what I know.
Translation: Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said)
Director: Mounir Abu Dibs (the legendary Ba'albek Festival founder - more here)
Production: Ba'albek Theatre Troupe
Locations: Byblos, Deir al-Kamar, and Ba'albek
Date: 1967 -- apparently at that year's Ba'albek summer festival? Right after the 1967 war??

Cast: will post more as I find out. For now all I know is that Michel Naba'a played Hamlet. Choreographer/dancer Georgette Gebara did the choreography and played the Player Queen in the play-within-a-play.

Apparently the show enjoyed a very involved audience, as this joke repeated online testifies:

Years ago, a performance of Hamlet in Arabic took place in Byblos with Michel Naba'a in the lead role (Directed by Mounir Abou Debs in Arabic). During the scene when the Ghost appears and advises Hamlet on what to do, as he is leaving, he says to Hamlet in Arabic "LA TANSANI YA HAMLET". [Don't forget me, Hamlet.] Hamlet shrieks out "ANSAAK????". [Forget you???] Whereupon, the audience joined in : "Da KALAAM??".

(Here is "Ansaak, Da Kalaam?" [Forget you? What an idea!], the Umm Kulthum song the joke is referring to.)

But it seems not to have been new in 1967, but rather (and this would make much more sense, both war-wise and Shakespeare-quadricentennial-wise) in 1964 or earlier. A Mounir Abou Debs adaptation of Hamlet is mentioned as early as 1963 in a UNESCO report, as an example of the televised drama in Arabic that was raising the overall cultural level of Lebanese TV programming.

Another UNESCO report, this one a book-length 1981 study by Joseph Abu Rizk titled La Politique Culturelle au Liban, cites the production of Shakespeare's Hamlet (among a long list of other prestigious works) as evidence of "le niveau atteint par le theatre [libanais]." (67-68).

If you're in Lebanon at the moment (though you probably have other things on your mind), you might be able to find more info and/or some photos of the Hamlet production somewhere in here.

Mohamed Sobhi's Hamlet - video now online

2011-08-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Global Shakespeares web archive has put up QuickTime video of Mohamed Sobhi's Hamlet, a landmark production first staged at the Art Studio Theatre in 1971 and then reprised and filmed for television in 1976-7. Filming was directed by Nur al-Demerdash. The full-length video is here - it runs over two hours. Helpfully, they've posted some excerpts too -- individual scenes that are more convenient to use in class.

I should say, "landmark" does not mean it's great theatre. Critic Hani Shukrallah memorably summed it up in a 2001 column about Sobhi on the occasion of the latter's controversial (and awful) Ramadan mini-series dramatizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to look forward to Egyptian "character actor" Mohamed Sobhi performing no less than 14 roles in a TV serial dramatising the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which apparently has had millions spent on it and is to be broadcast in many parts of our glorious Arab nation. The casting is apt. Sobhi is symptomatic of "the state of the nation" -- or is it civilisation? Several years ago I had to suffer through a Hamlet performed by this man, hailed as one of our great actors. I'm no drama critic, but even I could recognise that Sobhi's acting skills seem to lie precisely in "saw[ing] the air too much with... [his] hands" and "tear[ing] a passion to tatters." Little wonder, perhaps, that he is so well admired; tearing a passion to tatters seems to be a particular predilection of "our civilisation" these days.

Later I'll try to comment on particular scenes, either here or in the metadata on the Global Shakespeares web site. Meanwhile, I just wanted to tell the story of how I obtained this video.

Sobhi has, in case you didn't notice from the quote above (he played all the parts in his own miniseries!), a certain sense of his own importance. And Egyptian society has rewarded this attitude with all kinds of celebrity and adulation. When I made a trip to Cairo in 2007 while working on my book, a theatre scholar friend managed to find me Sobhi's cell phone number. Someone else tried to give me Sobhi's number too, but it was incorrect. Anyway I called and made an appointment to meet and talk about his Hamlet. But he wasn't in Cairo. He had built himself a studio complex way out in the desert along the Cairo-Alexandria road. He had called it Sonbol City for the Arts, after a character in one of his films. Okay. I hired a car-and-driver and made the trek. It was about an hour and a half.

Sonbol City included film editing facilities, a swimming pool, health club, various meeting rooms, etc. But it was a pretty surreal - sprawling and empty, except for Sobhi himself, who was editing his latest Ramadan series, attended by a skeleton staff of a couple of dozen people. I don't know if it has filled up since then.

I don't know if you can see the images of Sobhi in these photos - they were everywhere.

Along with comedy/tragedy masks and vignettes from his films, etc., including from the period of his collaboration with Egyptian playwright Lenin El-Ramly (the two split up quite a while ago).

Plaster casts of the greatest Egyptian entertainers: that's Umm Kulthum second from right with the sunglasses.

And on the walls, stylized portraits of Sobhi in his most famous roles...

...including Hamlet. (You can see in the film... he looked a little better than this.)

Anyway, I waited for a while and then the man himself came out to talk with me. He was tired and unshaven, in the middle of that Ramadan serial. But he gave me a great interview - we talked for over an hour, discussing many details of his Hamlet production -- of which, at that point, I had only read reviews. Most reviewers had focused on the play's opening scene: it starts with the epilogue, Hamlet's funeral. Sobhi said he did this in order to make the audience think: "I didn't want them to sit there wondering what would happen, but asking themselves why it had to happen." When I remarked that this sounded like a Brechtian desire, he said: "No, it wasn't Brechtian or anything." Finally I asked if he could share a recording. Yes, he said. There was an old videotape. It was from the 1970s. It was film but then had been converted to VHS. He didn't have it with him. Could I meet him in Cairo in two days?
I could, but stupidly I somehow spent the whole day calling the incorrect cell phone number. When I finally called the right one towards evening, it was too late -- he was already back at Sonbol. But he had taken the VHS tape with him. Could I come pick it up?
Fortunately, the driver remembered the location and was able to go without me. He picked up the tape and brought it back to Cairo. Then he nearly refused to accept money, so thrilled was he to be able to meet the great actor in person, to actually shake Mohamed Sobhi's hand. Back in the US, I had it converted to a DVD, and now the good people at Global Shakespeares have posted it online for your delectation. Enjoy!

"Jihadist Hamlet": Western commentators catch up to Hamlet's political dimensions

2011-08-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

In a Counterpunch piece with the bizarrely alluring subtitle "Anders Breivik, Amy Winehouse, Hamlet and Tahrir Square," commentator Caroline Rooney (who holds some sort of academic position in Kent, with the enviable title of "RCUK Global Uncertainties Fellow") finds some striking similarities between the character of Hamlet and that of the contemporary militant Islamist jihadist. Her point in making this perhaps "odd" or "to some, discordant" claim is to humanize the jihadist, to show that far from being some kind of brainwashed automaton with a very shallow subjectivity quite unlike our own, can quite possibly be a deep character, on par with the quintessential deep character of western civilization. Excellent observation! (And I make a very similar point in my book...)

One of the intriguing things about Shakespeare’s plays is how they have the capacity to assume, time and again, a contemporary relevance. In terms of the concerns of our times, it is surprisingly not hard to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet as exhibiting the psyche of a Jihadist extremist. In brief, Hamlet is dismayed by the socio-political corruption he finds all around him and in relation to this he develops a savior complex: he believes that it is his almost divinely appointed task to set the world to rights. He believes that the wrong he has to address is betrayal of a divinized father ideal: that to which all loyalty must be fanatically owed. Hamlet is puritanical; he is disgusted by sex and berates his mother for acting on her sexual desires while he orders Ophelia to veil herself, more or less, in his ‘get thee to a nunnery’ speech. Hamlet also has a paranoid attitude, one of intense distrust of ‘infidel’ types such as Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and, of course, especially Claudius.
The reason that I put forward this odd—and, possibly to some, discordant— proposition of a Jihadist Hamlet is to challenge some of the reductive post 9/11 framings of Islamic extremism by politicians and the media. One of the particularly reductive features of these framings has been the widespread simplistic inference that extremism is culturally other, and specifically Islamic.

You can see where this is going, and it's praiseworthy. Not only as a reconsideration of violent Islamism (highly salutary) but, I would argue, as a reconsideration of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's only a few years ago (starting, say, about 10 years ago? Around September of 2001 perhaps?) that Anglo-American critics, led by figures such as Linda Charnes and Margreta de Grazia, have begun to write about the political dimensions in Hamlet, which had been long obvious to critics and audiences in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Arab world. And now, since our times have gotten far enough "out of joint," also to us.
Rooney takes this mirroring as her explicit subject:

While the figure of Hamlet has been taken by some literary critics to be emblematic of the emergence of the modern Western subject, what does it then mean to notice that such a subject would seem to exhibit Jihadist tendencies? It means not only that the repeated othering of extremism is untenable but also that extremism accompanies the modern subject as the effect of its emergence. In other words, if the modern subject is a Dr Jekyll then Mr Hyde is his extremist double: not another as such but a phantom other of refused identifications. While the West currently produces a phantom of Islamic extremism, this paranoid structure comes to be inhabited by the Jihadist who attempts to invert it, that is, in producing the West as its demonic other.

From here it gets rather weird, though: it turns out the Crusader is just the Jihadist in a funhouse mirror.

In terms of this logic of opposing mirrors, the Jihadist fighting the Crusader is just like the Crusader fighting the Jihadist. Or, Hamlet the Jihadist could also be Hamlet the Crusader. With this turn, it becomes possible to account for the political psyche of Anders Breivik , not Anders the Dane but rather Anders the Norwegian. Like his literary counterpart, Anders the Norwegian considers the rulers of the state to be corrupt and considers his role to be one of setting the world to rights. From his website, Anders appears to have been mesmerized by the specters of idealized military manhood: here, we might recall that the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears precisely as a suit of armor.

I'm not saying she's wrong, just a bit too breathy perhaps.

Anders and Amy [Winehouse] may be said to embody the sadism and masochism of our cultures or, politically, the ever-present potential for fascism.

Still, nice to see Hamlet taking his rightful place in that conversation.

Call for papers - journal issue on "Global Shakespeares"

2011-08-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

A special issue of Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association

on "Global Shakespeare"

Deadline: September 30, 2011

Editor: Alexander Huang, acyhuang@gwu.edu

The Arab world is not yet represented in this issue!

He invites two types of submissions:
• Research article: criticism (5,000-8,000 words)
• Short performance reviews (1,000-2,000 words)
Full CFP available here.

Eating your politics: dates for Ramadan

2011-08-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

From one site that collects Shakespeare quotations related to various foods:

The Winter's Tale, IV, 3:
CLOWN: I cannot do't without counters. Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice,--what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. She hath made me four and twenty nose-gays for the shearers, three-man-song-men all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means and bases; but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to horn-pipes. I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace; dates?--none, that's out of my note; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o' the sun.

Sounds like the shopping list for an iftar feast, doesn't it? (Never mind about the puritan.) What got me curious about Shakespeare and dates in the first place was a prior curiosity about the Cairo dried fruit market. Every year at Ramadan, merchants name their wares after politicians and other celebrities, both to attract customers and to show off their sense of humor. So I wanted to see what they were calling them this year. Disconcertingly, no individual names seem to have emerged - the principle of "the revolution" has not yet produced any actually plausible leaders. Still, it's nice to see the post-Mubarak spirit finding its way into the market, according to this article published on July 26:

One brand of dates is called ‘Revolution’, another ‘Martyrs’, a third “January 25” and a fourth ‘Freedom’.
“All the brands are expensive, because they stand for something special,” [one customer] told the Egyptian Mail in an interview.
This year, as Ramadan approaches, dates have assumed proud revolutionary names, which show that this revolution, for which people were longing for decades, has developed a commercial flavour. The most expensive dates on the markets, the above-mentioned ‘Revolution’, sell for LE15 ($2.50) per kilo.
The cheapest dates are called ‘Tora Prisoners’, reflecting the popular anger at scores of former officials and ministers who are now in Tora Prison in southern Cairo.
But none of the brands is named after the former president, who is hospitalised in Sharm el-Sheikh, or his wife and his two sons, although the latter are indeed Tora prisoners.

Well, Egyptians can have very short memories sometimes - at least that's what the Date Market Index suggests. In 2009, Gulf News reports, the most succulent and expensive dates were named after President Obama.

Quite a change from 2001-2, when I last lived in Egypt. At that time, Ramadan was in November-December, date prices were very high, and Al-Ahram Weekly had this report:

There are six kinds of dates to be found at the market: Sakouti, Baladi, Gandillah, Gargoudah, Malikani and Bartamouda. Others, Nashed says, are given names by their sellers who often draw on current events or famous people. As the attack against America and the war in Afghanistan are today's main topics of conversation, "Osama Bin Laden is the king of the market," one merchant told Al-Ahram Weekly. According to this seller, the price of a kilo of Bin Laden has reached LE16 [at that time about $4.50] within the market and LE20 outside. And what about Bush? "He has no place in the market," was the final and decisive answer.

شكسبير في التحرير (Shakespeare in Tahrir)

2011-08-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

You knew it was coming, but here it is. As the post-"revolutionary" (I still think it was largely a military coup) situation in Egypt becomes more intense, with a tug-of-war between the military and the protesters, between secular-state and Islamist protesters, and between different branches of Islamists (traditionalists vs. neo-fundamentalists) -- as all this heats up, could Hamlet be far from the conversation?

Tweeted about three weeks ago at http://yfrog.com/kil04ngj

Spacey's Richard III to come to the Gulf

2011-08-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, but this is interesting. From an interview with "UAE-born social entrepreneur Badr Jafar " on the occasion of the release of the charity single song "Bokra" (Tomorrow), produced with Quincy Jones:

I also feel that we need to further develop theater in the Middle East, which is why I recently launched the Middle East Theater Academy with famous actor Kevin Spacey who has dedicated a lot of his life to working with children and nurturing their creative talents with theater. We already conducted a number of workshops in the UAE and Qatar and will bring the first major production of Shakespeare’s Richard III to the Gulf later this year, with Kevin Spacey himself playing Richard III.

Presumably (and accurately) this puts Sulayman Al-Bassam's RIII in the category of "minor production." Still, if someone is on site, it would be interesting to compare the UAE reception of the two shows.

Spacey again - art imitates life imitates art

2011-08-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

From a Sydney Morning Herald interview with Kevin Spacey, on playing Richard III:

But in the meantime, it is Shakespeare's king who absorbs his attention, in a production that carries fresh relevance in the light of the revolutionary Arab protests.
''It's interesting looking at these dictators around the world,'' Spacey says, ''[and seeing] how their idea of what a king looks like is very much based on English monarchy.''

Huffy "expert" on Shakespeare and Middle East tyrants

2011-08-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

Forgot to blog about this HuffPost column when Google alerted me to it a couple of weeks ago. Who is this (self-anointed?) "expert" Shai Baitel, and why do his dyspeptic ruminations on Kevin Spacey as Richard III (under the pompous title "Power and Downfall -- Between Shakespeare and Arab Tyrants") merit placement as political analysis? Ah, but this is the magic of invoking Shakespeare to discuss contemporary politics. Any hint of today's political violence adds the spice of perceived relevance to a simple run-through of an old history play.

But can Shakespeare's Richard III, in Mendes's thoughtful interpretation and irresistibly brought to life by Spacey, compare to the ilk of the rulers of Iran, to Bashar al-Assad, to Hassan Nasrallah, to Muammar Gaddafi?

And referring to Shakespeare's plays automatically gives depth to otherwise incoherent ponderings on the Middle East.

But unlike Richard III our Middle Eastern despots have a larger arsenal at their hands: they are a 21st century variety of ruthless sovereigns, with propaganda, mass media, surveillance and intelligence agencies, sophisticated weapons and technology, as tools to keep their people in check and secure their rule. Richard III was left with shamelessly sowing terror. He did not hesitate to kill, including members of his own family, to reach his goal. Whoever had the temerity to disagree with Richard III's opinion or argued with him went to prison -- at best -- or had to die. And he had the absolute power of the armed forces, which he used against his enemies. In that respect there are parallels indeed between Richard III and the modern-day Arab tyrannical leaders.

Whatever.

Is Asian Shakespeare "worthy"?

2011-08-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

What the hell does this mean? From an Edinburgh Fringe Festival preview in the New Statesman:

The International Festival is exploring links between east and west, hence a Chinese Hamlet, a Korean Lear and a new stab in Arabic at One Thousand and One Nights. Yet it need not be that worthy. Under Stephen Earnhart, a Japanese company has adapted Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (20-24 August). Buy me a drink and I'll tell you what I know: that he is, at least, an excellent novelist.

Would be interested in any reports on Tim Supple's 1001 Nights (with text adaptation help from Hanan al-Shaykh!), if anyone gets to see it.

Greetings from Prague

2011-07-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Prague. The World Shakespeare Congress here was really lovely in every way. But did I remember to take a picture of our seminar on "Shakespeare on the Arab Stage" this afternoon? I did not. I was too busy enjoying the amazingly fast-paced and fruitful conversation with Rafik Darragi, Sameh Hanna, Jacqueline Jondot, Francis Guinle, and auditors including Mustapha Fahmi, Abdallah Al-Dabbagh, Poonam Trivedi, and others. We have a long way to go toward fully developing this field -- especially as regards involving scholars of literature and theatre and theatre practitioners from a broader range of Arab countries -- but it's encouraging to see that some dynamic scholars are already doing really interesting work.

More details on the content of the research later. Meanwhile, instead of the picture of our seminar, here is a photo of me with my friend Alex Huang, who works on Chinese Shakespeares, at the farewell reception hosted by the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

Opening of first "soliloquy" in Tanyus 'Abdu's Hamlet, 1901

2011-07-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

أبتي أين أنت تنظر ما تم صار عرصاً ذاك الذي كان مأتم

وغدت بعدك المآتم اعياداً وذاك الثغر الحزين تبسم.

Why are the publishers having so much trouble getting this quotation to appear correctly in Arabic in the forthcoming issue of Shakespeare Studies? Right-to-left issues are a pain. My article on 'Abdu will be in Shakespeare Studies Vol. 39, accessible via full-text humanities search engines as well as Google Books and the like.

Shakespeare... at a Damascus bus stop

2011-07-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

One might not think there would be time for theatre in Damascus these days, let alone Shakespeare, but apparently the Bard makes a cameo (along with some of his characters including Othello and Juliet) in an absurdist play being staged tonight and tomorrow at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus. Read more here (in Arabic). The rhyming title might be translated "The Position of Ezbekia on the Crisis of Drama." Not very easy to tell from this (unfavorable) review what the show was about, except that it made a perhaps awkward effort to integrate references to current events including random arrests, conversations between ghosts, etc.

Global Shakespeares electronic archive

2011-06-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday over at MIT working with Belinda Yung on the Arab world section of the "Global Shakespeares electronic archive. I'm the "regional editor." We've already put up skeletal production info on a few Arab productions and adaptations of Shakespeare - you can expect a lot more in a week or two, including extensive clips from Mohamed Sobhi (محمد صبحي)'s melodramatic 1970s Hamlet production with the Art Studio company.

If you have text or video materials on more plays, please send them to me so we can get them posted!

Trailer: Richard III: An Arab VIP

2011-06-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

When I saw Sulayman Al-Bassam at the Kennedy Center in March 2009, there was a documentary film crew hanging around. Their presence was just another comic detail in the backstage buzz: technical glitches, dressing-room jokes, a bit part Sulayman had to play because a Kuwaiti cast member couldn't get excused from his day job as a Ministry of Education employee even though Kuwait's government had given $1 million as sponsors of the Arabesque festival, etc. etc. So then there were these random guys with movie cameras. Anyway, here's the lovely trailer for the film they've made (I've already posted one review):

ٌRichard III coming to Kurdistan

2011-06-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

Update (in Arabic) on 66-year-old Iraqi director Salah al-Qasab's plans (which I've mentioned before) to stage Richard III with Kurdish actors in Sulymaniya, Kurdistan. Funded by the Kurdish region's Ministry of Youth and Sports. Hmm, wonder what this one will be about?

Review of documentary on Al-Bassam's Richard III

2011-06-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Layla Ahmad's review (in Arabic) of the documentary Richard III: An Arab VIP says the film is "worth watching."

Shakespeare for the blind in Lebanon

2011-06-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

Can anyone help with this most worthy query from the leaders of Empowerment through Integration, Inc., an NGO that works with the blind (http://www.eti-vision.org/)?

This summer we are running day camps for blind kids ages 6-16 in Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon. As part of our curriculum, we are having the kids rehearse and perform some short plays and a puppet theater.

I would like to have the older kids "watch" an Arabic-language version of a Shakespearean play.
Do you by any chance have video recordings of theater productions that would be suitable for a young audience? I need the media itself (i.e. DVD) in order to show it.

Please send any leads to me or, better, contact the organization directly.

Early registration deadline for World Shakespeare Congress

2011-05-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

Prague! Shakespeare! Tuesday is your last chance for discounted early registration at the World Shakespeare Congress, to be held July 18-22.

Rafik Darragi and I are co-organizing what promises to be a small and interesting seminar on "Shakespeare on the Arab Stage." Scheduled for the last afternoon of the conference, so if the discussion gets really exciting we can adjourn directly to the pub. Stalkers and gawkers welcome! Download the draft program here: http://www.shakespeare2011.net/repository/doc/shakespeare2011-prague-congress-programme-matrix.pdf

Raja Shehadeh channels Hamlet

2011-05-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

I first began studying Arabic fourteen years ago in part because, on my first trip to San Francisco, I had randomly met Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh's cousin Nabil and immediately afterwards, walking into a used bookstore, stumbled on a copy of Shehadeh's memoir, The Third Way. That's part of what helped inspire my interest in the language and, eventually, in Arab appropriations of Shakespeare.
I want to quote Shehadeh here to illustrate how deeply the imagery of Hamlet -- particularly but not exclusively the young angry Hamlet of Act I -- has become interwoven with formulations of Palestinian identity, Arab identity, and the conflict over Palestine. This is from Shehadeh's interview in David Grossman's 2002 book The Yellow Wind (also reviewed here). He says:

Of the two ways open to me as a Palestinian -- to surrender to the occupation and collaborate with it, or to take up arms against it, two possibilities which mean, to my mind, losing one's humanity -- I choose the third way. To remain here. To see how my home becomes my prison, which I do not want to leave, because the jailer will then not allow me to return.

I believe it is no stretch to read Shehadeh's refusal to "take up arms" as related to Hamlet's hesitation during the "to be or not to be" soliloquy -- how to commit oneself to fighting an evil so huge that, like a "sea of troubles," it will simply swallow up the humanity of anyone who engages with it? Shehadeh's "to surrender... and to collaborate" are symbolically identical, in Arab political discourse, with Hamlet's "to die, to sleep."
Two unsatisfactory options which leave him searching for a "third way," one that lets his essential humanity be recognized and gives him (at least) a voice in shaping how his history comes out. You can see where the impulse comes from. Even if you question its efficacy. (And now his latest book, ever searching for a place to stand, seems to be harking back to the Ottomans.)

Documentary about Al-Bassam's Richard III

2011-05-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

A documentary about the international tour of Al-Bassam's Richard III: An Arab Tragedy premiered last month. Would love to hear from anyone who has seen it. Press release here, film website here.

Co-directed by Kuwaiti businessman and arts producer Shakir Abal with British TV director Tim Langford, Richard III “An Arab VIP” is a topical and timely documentary that melds Middle Eastern politics with onstage drama and offstage reality. In the film, the camera follows a pan Arab troupe of actors as they travel the world between the USA and the Middle East rehearsing and performing a highly acclaimed version of Shakespeare's Richard III as conceived from a contemporary Arab perspective by renowned Kuwaiti dramatist Sulayman Al-Bassam. In addition to the highly dramatic performances by the exemplary troupe of actors, the 70 minutes film also includes interviews with the cast and crew as well as behind-the-scenes footage that shows what it is like to tour a top-notch stage play in sometimes less than perfect circumstances. The film is in English and Arabic with subtitles.

Tanyus 'Abdu's "poetry" from Hamlet

2011-05-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Some high-cultural aspirations to enliven your rainy Wednesday.
These "poems" are from the slim 1925 diwan published shortly before his death by Tanyus 'Abdu (طانيوس عبده), with a brief but glowing preface from none other than Khalil Mutran. These are not really very poetic -- not even soliloquies so much as arias meant to be sung by Shaykh Salama Higazi (who later recorded some of them for Odeon Records).
Hamlet's "monologue of the skull" (bottom right):

Another version of "Monologue of the Skull" as well as two poems for Ophelia, "Wada`a Husna'" (Farewell, Beauty), and "Bayn Narayn" (Between Two Fires, which stands in for the clumsy "Doubt that the stars are fire" poem Hamlet includes in his letter to Ophelia):

Finally, most famously, "Hamlet and his Mother," an aria about which Muhammad `Awad Muhammad reminisces in his introduction to his own Hamlet translation as late as 1972.

Here is the man himself:

Al-Assadi's "Forget Hamlet" in Kuwait

2011-05-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

A production of Jawad Al-Assadi's "Insuu Hamlit" (first performed 1994 in Cairo, published 2000 in Beirut) directed by Issa Dhiab is touring Kuwait. Recently performed at Gulf University in Mushrif. Al-Siyasa newspaper has details here (in Arabic).

Abdo Wazen lecture in Sharjah: on Hamlet as monodrama

2011-05-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

Details here:
http://www.emaratalyoum.com/life/four-sides/2011-05-12-1.391691

http://www.alittihad.ae/details.php?id=44927&y=2011
http://www.albayan.ae/five-senses/culture/2011-05-11-1.1436632

Tunisia "To be or not to be"

2011-05-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

Another 2B moment from the rhetoric of the Arab revolutions. This one's a Facebook group called
Tunisie To be or not to be - شعب تونس نكون او لا نكون

'To Be or Not To Be' in Lebanon?

2011-05-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the slide from my AUB talk that the Daily Star reporter was alluding to. I took this photo in late Feb 2005 - it's the graffiti around Martyrs' Square (later Liberty Square) in downtown Beirut, where people were commemmorating the Valentine's Day 2005 car-bomb assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Can you see the faint writing, in English, right at the bottom of the photo?

"To be or not to be now is the time."

And here's another example of Lebanon-related "to be or not to be" rhetoric: Walid Jumblatt (this was before he broke with the March 14 grouping) saying a rally was absolutely crucial to the existential future of Lebanon.

"Notre combat c’est “être ou ne pas être.” No hyperbole or anything.

Flew home from glorious Beirut yesterday. Sigh.

Daily Star covers our Shakespeare conference at AUB

2011-05-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

Under the nice headline "Was Shakespeare an Orientalist?" Beirut's Daily Star covers our just-concluded conference on "Shakespeare's Imagined Orient" at AUB. Splendidly organized by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon of AUB's English department, the conference staged a conversation some of the most important scholars working to remap Shakespeare's relationship to the Muslim world. Five men were at the center of this conversation: Jerry Brotton, Dan Vitkus, Gerald Maclean, Jonathan Burton, and Gil Harris. My talk was really marginal to the whole thing (I'm not an early modernist), but for obvious journalistic reasons (even if she is not Arab, her readers are), the Daily Star reporter seized on it. She thus ironically supported Ferial Ghazoul's thesis (in "The Arabization of Othello"), which my talk was trying to problematize: the idea that when Arabs look at Shakespeare, "their point of view" (many Arabs, one point of view) leads them to an immediate and almost exclusive focus on the representation of people like themselves. Well, perhaps such narcissism is only human. Which of us can pick up a friend's book without looking up our own name in the index?

Boston trailer for Al-Bassam's "Speaker's Progress"

2011-05-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

Swear to Allah, it's not theatre! ArtsEmerson in Boston has officially announced its 2011-12 season, and Sulayman Al-Bassam's pseudo-post-but-actually-meta-theatrical The Speaker's Progress, a dark and jam-packed take on Twelfth Night, is on the schedule for October 12-16. Details and a video clip here.

"Hamlet's Arab Journey" available for pre-order

2011-04-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Woo hoo! Available for pre-order at Princeton: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9582.html.

If you happen to be in Boston...

2011-04-27T08:56:00.001-07:00

FREE Shakespeare PARADE, PERFORMANCES and SLAM!

Join us to celebrate the birthday of the Bard this Saturday in Harvard Square!

Actors' Shakespeare Project, Harvard Square Business Association &

ORFEO Group are pleased to once again announce

a birthday extravaganza for Mr. William Shakespeare and the Bookish Ball:

Saturday, April 30^th

in Harvard Square

from 12:00-4:30 pm.

Timeline for the day:

12:00: Parade starts at Hotel Veritas, One Remington Avenue

12:00 - 6:00: Bookish Ball at participating bookstores

12:30 -3:30 - Activity tables in Harvard Square on Palmer Street

1:00-3:00 - Performances at the Palmer Street Stage

3:00-4:30 - Shakespeare SLAM! at Redline (14 JFK Street) - tickets can be reserved on April 30th at ORFEO Group's activity table

All events are FREE and all ages are welcome!!

Parade and SLAM! will take place come rain or shine.

Monadhil Daood to produce Romeo and Juliet in London 2012

2011-04-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Among the works commissioned for the RSC-produced World Shakespeare Festival, directed by the RSC's Deborah Shaw and coming up next year (April to September) as part of the London 2012 Festival associated with the Olympics:

Romeo and Juliet, directed by Monadhil Daood - Iraqi Theatre Company, Baghdad

Shakespeare’s great love story, set against a backdrop of conflict between families, communities and generations, finds new purchase in the soil of contemporary Iraq, where sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia, ignited and fuelled from outside, has left its population exhausted by a cycle of violence and revenge. Baghdad’s Iraqi Theatre Company will create a Romeo and Juliet for a new generation, infused with Iraq’s rich traditions of poetry, music and ritual.

For Monadhil's previous work, see the Baghdad Iraqi Theatre's web site. He also played a hammy Polonius in Sulayman Al-Bassam's Al-Hamlet Summit and a terrifying Catesby in Al-Bassam's Richard III.

UPDATE 7/8/11: Full details of the RSC's World Shakespeare Festival to be announced in September, but it seems the RSC is one of the collaborators in the London 2012 festival; it's listed as a partner on this show and others. There's also going to be an RSC production that is explicitly international, provocatively titled, "What Country, Friends, is This?"

Comparing Iraqi politicians to Othello

2011-04-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

Writing on the Sotaliraq (Voice of Iraq) web site, op-ed writer Majid `Anqabi compares Iraq's governing elite to Othello (in Arabic). The headline is "Shakespeare's play Othello and the Fear of the Liberation Square Demonstrators."
`Anqabi mentions the theory "held by specialist scholars" that Othello was insecure about Desdemona because he was unable to satisfy her sexually, and thus became vulnerable to jealousy and had to kill her. His analogy is that the ruling Iraqi elite, unable to satisfy its people (e.g., by providing normal state services) is insecure and feels forced to crack down brutally when they demonstrate in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. A new twist to the woman-as-nation analogy. Also more evidence that most Arab readings of Othello are concerned with the spousal relationship, NOT the West.
Incidentally, the writer also invokes Safa' Khulusi and his nickname for Shakespeare, Shaykh Zubayr.

Clips from Al-Bassam's Twelfth Night adaptation

2011-04-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Sulayman has put up a few clips of Speaker's Progress, with surtitles. Some version of this show is coming to BAM and Boston's ArtsEmerson this fall.
(Sorry I can't quite get the video to be the right width - working on it. Link here.)

Happy Shakespeare Day

2011-04-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

يوم شكسبير سعيد - Hope everyone had a fabulous Shakespeare Day!

I saw that the Biblioteca Alexandrina is celebrating with a film festival. Anyone else do anything special? Did you talk like Shakespeare today, for instance?

Syrian student "Twelfth Night" production

2011-04-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

Amid everything happening in Syria, students at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts put on a production of Twelfth Night (of all things) earlier this month. `Ajaj Salim directed.

From the few pictures available it does not look like political allusions were the order of the day. Too bad: one could have a lot of fun with Malvolio.

The show then traveled to Sharjah, where it received warm reviews in Al-Bayan and Al-Ittihad (both in Arabic). Here's the press release with more background info.

"I'm Hamlet" to play in London 2012 Festival

2011-04-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Young Egyptian director Hani Afifi will stage his Hamlet adaptation, انا هاملت or I'm Hamlet, as part of the London 2012 festival around the Olympics, reports the Seventh Day site (in Arabic). The play premiered at Cairo's Creativity Center in the summer of 2009 and was well received at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre that September; Muhammad Fahim, in the role of Hamlet, won the festival's Best Actor prize. My favorite line is where Hamlet asks Ophelia (in the equivalent of the nunnery scene, which takes place at Cairo's upscale Cafe Cilantro: "But how can I date someone who has 500 friends on Facebook?"

"Ay, commerce you may call it"

2011-04-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

From a roundup of Abu Dhabi financial news:

Shares of Abu Dhabi's first real estate firm Aldar Properties gained 2.45 percent to close at Dhs1.68. Earlier in the day, Aldar announced that it development The Souk at Central Market will open its doors in November 2010 [sic], and it will harbour Abu Dhabi's first Shakespeare & Co restaurant, a Grand Stores Digital, a variety of cafes as well as over 20 watch and jewellery stores.

The statement added, "The Emporium at Central Market, primarily a fashion retail destination, will also be home to brands such as E4U, Spinneys, Magrudy's, Ted Baker, Bebe, Evita Peroni Pandora Jewellery, Network, Fabrika, Beymen Business, Alison Nelson Chocolate Bar, Fat burger and Studio Misr."

Saad Hariri as Hamlet

2011-04-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Google just came across (on what looks to be some right-of-reasonable Jewish-themed blog) this satirical sketch comparing Saad Hariri to Hamlet (pursued by ghost of his father Rafik, even as evil stepfather Hassan Nasrallah seduces the weak mother/land, Lebanon-Gertrude). Someone posted it back in January, when Saad's government collapsed.

Hamlet [to himself]: And this is why I have returned from Dubai? When I could have as well managed the business from there, enjoying myself like a pig in the mud? Or even from London... oh London, London... And here, what do I have here? Shia, Sunni, Christians, Druze all scheming and aiming to kill each other, the heat, the Syrians, the Hezbollah, the Israelis for crying out loud... who needs all this crap? Now this revenge schtick too... no, I definitely should get a ticket and scram!

The framing is better than the writing, but whatcha gonna do? Unlike Hamlet, Saad Hariri has never been known for his eloquence.

Merchant of Venice in Boston

2011-04-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

This is not about "Arab Shakespeare" per se, but I want to write about this production, so I'll use the pretext that Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice does depict an Arab: the Prince of Morocco. Though not as well known as Othello or Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, the Moorish suitor echoes them in certain ways, loving Portia "not wisely but too well." Doomed by his unseemly fascination with luxury commodities (gold!), he chooses the wrong casket (all that glitters!) and quickly leaves the scene.
The show I saw last weekend, by Theatre for a New Audience (directed by the Yugoslavian-born Darko Tresnjak) at ArtsEmerson in Boston, made the strange decision to costume the Prince of Morocco (the fine African-American actor Raphael Nash Thompson) as Gulf Arab royalty. Here he is flanked by Portia and her staff on the left, his own weird attendants (why does his head of security look like a flight attendant for Emirati Airlines?) on the right. Yes, that's an engraved sword he's presenting to Portia.

What's up with this? The role is unabashed ethnic caricature, and in modern productions a sort of turbaned Leo Africanus (or Moorish Ambassador) getup is typical. But playing the Prince this way let Tresnjak emphasize that this production was really about money as much as ethnic difference. Portia (Kate MacCluggage)'s feelings toward this suitor were ambiguous; she allowed herself several apparently heartfelt racist comments ("May all of his complexion woo me so!"), but she also seemed very attracted to him physically and comfortable flirting with him. The exotic sex appeal? The oil money? Both? Unlike her second suitor, he was a dignified and well-spoken man, a true member of the international aristocracy. In the end she may have been a bit disappointed (though she said otherwise) that he chose the wrong box, the one labeled "Who chooses me will get what many men desire." Childish, conformist Moor. What a pity.

The odd portrayal of the Moor ties in with what was so strange about the whole production. Tresnjak's Venice is made to resemble New York circa 2008, a glitzy and fratty town where the tone is set by young investment bankers flying high on testosterone and Starbucks. The phones are smart and the Wall Street boys are too, trading the smug elbow jabs of financial capitalism at its most arrogant.

The setting has potential, but why isn't Shylock integrated into it? He is simply a man attached to his home and his daughter and his tribe: not even necessarily a banker. This makes him timeless, simply "a Jew." We never see him in anything like a work or office setting; his home is full of decontextualized Jewish kitsch (lanterns, candelabra, vague klezmer music), a weird break from the Apple-store sleekness (as my sister-in-law observed) of the rest of the set. This -- and the fact that Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham's acting towered over that of others, especially the milquetoast Portia -- makes the whole Wall Street setting with its 21st-century shenanigans suddenly irrelevant. The anti-Semitism is frat-boy cruel, but Shylock's response is simple atavism.

Everything else the production has going for it -- Portia's evident jealousy of her Bassanio's love for the closeted Antonio, Jessica's visibly growing nausea at the betrayal she has committed, Gobbo's rap antics -- is overshadowed by this basic failure to integrate the production's strongest character into its underlying premise. Incomplete allegory is the biggest risk of contemporary-dress adaptations; this show succumbs.

By the way, the ArtsEmerson folks all but announced that Al-Bassam's Speaker's Progress is coming to Boston next fall. Stay tuned!

"Annual Shakespeare Conference" at Biblioteca Alexandrina

2011-04-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently the Shakespeare conference held in April at the Biblioteca Alexandrina is now an annual event. This year's conference was devoted to "The Politics of Power in Shakespeare's History Plays." BA director Ismail Serageldin gave a lecture as part of the proceedings.

Qadhafi: Shakespeare Was an Arab Named Shaykh Zubayr

2011-04-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for a source for the widely known fact that Muammar Qadhafi claimed Shakespeare was not a native-born Englishman but, in fact, an Arab named Shaykh Zubayr.
Cork Milner's site on the authorship controversy gives us this:

The most bizarre of all the pretenders is Muammar al-Qaddafi's choice, Sheik Zubayr bin William. Quaddafi came up with his champion in 1989 when Radio Tehran announced that Libya's “Great One” had declared that an Arab sheik named Zubayr bin William, who had been born in the sixteenth century, was Shakespeare.

I should point out that Qadhafi did not originate the bizarre claim that Shakespeare was a crypto-Arab. Usually cited in jest, the Shaykh Zubayr “theory” holds that Shakespeare was actually an Arab Muslim living in Britain. Various authors cite “evidence” including Shakespeare’s full lips and “Islamic” beard in the supposedly "un-English" Chandos portrait(above); his many treatments of mistaken or doubtful identity; and his allegedly unflattering views of Jews, Turks, and the British (supposedly clear in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and the history plays). Who but an Arab could harbor unfavorable views of precisely these three groups?

M.M. Badawi ("Shakespeare and the Arabs," 1964) and Ferial Ghazoul ("The Arabization of Othello," 1998) trace the Shaykh Zubayr authorship theory to a mid-nineteenth-century Lebanese satirical writer, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq; it was later taken up in earnest by Iraqi scholar Ṣafā’ Khulūṣī and then painstakingly refuted by Ibrāhīm Ḥamāda in a book-length essay, عروبة شكسبير (“The Arabness of Shakespeare,” 1989). Qadhafi drew Western headlines by mentioning it (perhaps jokingly? who can tell with such a lunatic?) in 1989.

But the conceit of an Arab Shakespeare has also appealed to all kinds of intercultural writers addressing Western readers. My favorite is Wole Soyinka in his essay "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" (replublished in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage). In a similar vein, Jordanian-Irish-American novelist Diana Abu Jaber in her novel Crescent has an Iraqi-American character invoke the theory, tongue-in-cheek, speaking to an American graduate student: “Did you know that Shakespeare’s favorite food was stuffed eggplant? And there’s some who say that Shakespeare’s name was actually Sheikh Zubayr . . . There’s a nice thesis for you.’” (132). Sulayman al-Bassam resorts to a similar opening gambit in a 2005 Guardian column. So the authorship theory can be a playful bid for intercultural understanding, not only (as with Qadhafi) an insane claim of Arab cultural priority.
By the way, the would-be Arabic name preserves the phallic imagery of spear-shaking. Zubr = penis. So the diminutive zubayr, on one reading, is "little penis." Shake it, Will, habibi!

Hamlet and Hamlet satire postponed in Egypt

2011-03-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

A protest strike by young theatre people (in Arabic) has postponed the presentation at Cairo's high-profile Tal`ia (Vanguard) Theatre of three plays including Hamlet and The Dance of the Scorpions, Mahmoud Aboudoma's 1989 postmodern political Hamlet offshoot. The three were apparently scheduled to run for a full week -- which is a big deal since experimental and youth (or other amateur) plays typically only get to play for one or two nights.

Obama depicted as Hamlet on Libya

2011-03-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

It is predictable that, even as Qadhafi is typed as Richard III or any of a number of other Shakespearean villains, Barack Obama gets described as Hamlet.

From Hip Hop Republican, 3/22/11

A few highlights:

Newsweek in a piece called The Big Dither: "The president has been more Hamlet than Macbeth since the beginning of the revolutionary crisis that has swept the desert lands of North Africa and the Middle East. To act or not to act? That has been the question. The results of his indecision have been unhappy."
Victor Davis Hanson generalizes the lack-of-leadership thing to Obama's presidency as a whole: "Hamlet couldn't quite ever act in time — given all the ambiguities that such a sensitive prince first had to sort out. In the meantime, a lot of bodies piled up through his indecision and hesitancy."
This caricature from Crystal Wright's piece at Hip Hop Republican.
And of course the Right Side News has to weigh in: "We have a 'Hamlet on the Potomac' in our Oval Office. If you listen closely you can hear Obama twisting himself into knots asking the wrenching question: 'To lead… or NOT to lead?' (Our apologies to Bill Shakespeare!)"
Former CFR chairman Leslie Gelb begs to differ (and engages in some Shakespeare interpretation in the process).
And Saul Landau in Counterpunch goes even further, denouncing the whole Hamlet role as a trap into which Obama has fallen.

It's interesting to see the Anglo-American view of Hamlet as hesitator, quite at odds with the typical Arab view of Hamlet as revolutionary martyr/hero, getting a tiny bit of play in the Arabic press through translations of articles by American pundits. Here's the one by Victor Davis Hanson (in Arabic, in the Gulf-based al-Bayan) and here's the Leslie Gelb piece on hypocrisy.

Beirut conference: "Shakespeare's Imagined Orient"

2011-03-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

More information on the "Shakespeare's Imagined Orient" conference at AUB next month. Conference schedule to be posted soon. Meanwhile abstracts of plenary talks are up, and registration is here. If you are in Beirut, please come check it out!

Globe's young-adult Macbeth in UAE

2011-03-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

Take a break from watching a bloody dictator fight to the death against foreign-supported rebels on satellite TV... to watch one do it on stage.

London's Globe Theatre educational project (Globe Education's Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank) is bringing its "educational" version of Macbeth to the UAE. The performance of the show, created specifically for teenagers, was last night at the Abu Dhabi Theatre (would love to hear about audience reception from anyone who was there) and on March 27 and 28 at Al Madinat Theatre, Dubai.

Comparing Qadhafi to Richard III

2011-03-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

As foreign news coverage becomes unavoidable, Shakespeare becomes our contemporary once again. Here are a couple of examples; I'm sure there will be others as events develop.

From The Independent on March 14:

I arrived at the theatre for a performance of Richard III last week with an image from that evening's television news in my head. A line of men lay on a road in Libya. Their hands were pinned to their sides and their noses were flat against the tarmac. But the camera panned low. You could see the sheer terror in their eyes as a beefy Gaddafi loyalist droned a litany of places where his men had killed protesters and where they yet would kill more. The men on the road are probably dead now.
Richard III is a play about a man of violence who maintains himself in office through a regime of unremitting brutality. It was written around 1590 but it is a mark of Shakespeare's evergreen genius that the dynamics it describes are still being played out in Libya, and elsewhere, today.

From something called Economicpopulist, back on Feb 15:

Like Richard III before the Battle of Bosworth Field, Gaddafi watches supporters vanish from top to the bottom of his army. His response has been no less brutal than Richard's, with assaults on his own people by hired thugs that he bought in neighboring countries. It will not end well for him, but it will end soon.

Richard III in Kurdish northern Iraq?

2011-03-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Salah Qasab, one of Iraq's best-known directors Shakespeare (Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth, etc.), is talking about staging an adaptation of Richard III in Irbil, Sulaymaniye, and other venues in the Kurdish region of Iraq, if he can get enough support from Kurdistan's ministry of culture. A few details in his interview with Al-Sabah al-Jadid newspaper (in Arabic).
But apparently he has had this plan for a while.

Al-Bassam on Speaker's Progress in The Guardian

2011-03-18T18:39:00.000-07:00

Sulayman Al-Bassam has a little article in The Guardian on how his current show, a very pessimistic frame story incorporating an Arab adaptation of Twelfth Night,

has changed in production because of recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.

More photos from the production previews here.
The show is coming to BAM in New York next fall.

Some comic relief

2011-03-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

Random funny cartoon, just to show that EVERYTHING is related to everything else, and Shakespeare even more so, here:

Afghan Shakespeare in Globe's series

2011-03-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

And it's Corinne Jaber, the French actress who directed Love's Labour's Lost in Kabul in 2005 and 2006, who will be doing the Globe's Dari-language Comedy of Errors. For more on Corinne's Afghan ventures and her recent residency at BU: http://www.bu.edu/today/node/12412.

Revolutionary Egypt: a "To Be Or Not To Be" moment

2011-03-11T18:41:00.000-08:00

A couple of samples from online articles that quote Hamlet to underscore the urgency of events in Egypt.

From an alarmist FoxNews (of course) interview with Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris, who actually supported the Tahrir protesters and even bought them tents and blankets:

When the protests began, Sawiris, a Christian billionaire who owns everything from hotels and construction companies to cell phone and investment interests, was out of the country. He chose to return, unlike other businessmen who have already fled.
“I came back because this was not a revolution of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This was the young people of Egypt doing what we failed to do … There is not a single other businessman who has supported it because it’s very dangerous for their interests; but the country is in a position to be or not to be,” he said.

Toward the end of a long, passionate article by Mariam Saad in something called The Peninsula:

Generations grew up within the armed forces and were trained to obey the government and surrender to its resolutions. However, if the situation deteriorates and becomes desperate, the challenge poses itself to the individual; to be or not to be? How will the situation resolve itself?

You can easily find many more of these in English and especially in Arabic.

To some ears, even the protesters' chants had a Shakespearean ring to them! Al-Hayat column by Abdel Ghani Talis, in Arabic, here.

Update on Arabic Tempest

2011-01-26T06:26:00.000-08:00

Update - It's Sulayman Al-Bassam directing the Arabic-language Tempest at the Globe Theatre next year.
A certain lack of imagination on their part, I daresay -- but at least they can be confident it will be well done.

Latest update (May 8, 2011): I talked to Sulayman and he is no longer involved in this project. Decided there was not so much that he could interestingly do with The Tempest right now. Stay tuned for more on the whole Olympiad-related extravaganza, and let me know if you have more details.

The Globe goes global

2011-01-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

After the RSC's Complete Works season, how could this not be next? Shakespeare's 38 plays to be performed in 38 different languages. The Guardian writes:

Anyone who struggles with Shakespeare in English will next year be able to see if it is any easier in Lithuanian. Or Portuguese, Italian or Spanish, perhaps. And if all that fails – Troilus and Cressida in Maori?

In fact, there will be 38 different ways to experience it, as Shakespeare's Globe presents all of the Bard's plays, each in a different language, as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Apparently Arabic has been selected for The Tempest (stay tuned for director and cast info) -- but I bet that won't be nearly as interesting as the Urdu Taming of the Shrew!

My students email with Sulayman Al-Bassam

2010-11-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've posted an email exchange on The Al-Hamlet Summit over on our class blog: http://globalshakespearesbu.blogspot.com/2010/11/student-email-dialogue-with-sulayman-al.html

Beirut conference - Shakespeare and the Orient

2010-11-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

CFP: SHAKESPEARE’S IMAGINED ORIENT (MAY 4-6, 2011)
Due Jan 21 2011
American University of Beirut
shakespeareandtheorient@gmail.com
The American University of Beirut is hosting a three-day conference on Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient on 4-6 May 2011. Speakers include Jonathan Burton (West Virginia University), Gerald Maclean (University of Exeter, UK), Margaret Litvin (Boston University), Daniel Vitkus (Florida State University) and Richard Wilson (Cardiff University). Shakespeare studies has recently experienced a noticeable and dramatic geographical shift. As the textual landscape of Shakespeare’s drama changes, it takes new forms and now points to new horizons, namely the East and the Orient, and more particularly the Levant. From the blasted heaths of England, Shakespeare moves to the most arid and yet fertile soils of the Levant. The aim of the conference, in this emergent field, is to reconsider Shakespeare’s diffusion from both Pre and Postcolonial Middle Eastern perspectives and to examine Shakespeare’s critical relevance to understanding religion and politics on both a local scale (in the Middle East/the Orient) and globally. Reaching across disciplinary boundaries, Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient aims to prove how the critical and artistic reception of Shakespeare in the Orient is paramount to apprehending and reinventing Shakespeare as a cultural and social bridge uniting the “East” and the “West” in the landscape of global culture. The organisers of the conference hope to offer a critical insight into Shakespeare and Early Modern political theology that would help refashion, remap broader issues that engage the status of cultural and religious identity, nation, and individuality in the landscape of global culture. With such issues in mind, we invite submissions concerning the following range of topics: - Representations of the Orient in Shakespeare's Work, - Christian/Muslim Representation/Interaction on Shakespeare's/the Early Modern stage, - Local/Global Shakespeare (from a Middle Eastern perspective), - Shakespeare's women and the Orient, - Desire, Phantasm, and the Orient, - Identity and Nationhood, - Material Culture and the Imagined Orient on Shakespeare's Stage.

Please send abstracts (300 words) or session proposals and brief CV by 21 January 2011. Notifications will be sent by 15 February 2011. On your abstract please include your name, institution, city and state or country, email address and phone number. E-mail your abstracts/session proposals as a Word file. Please note that each presentation is limited to 25 minutes (including questions). Full details can be downloaded from the conference website at www.aub.edu.lb/conferences/shake_orient/ Questions may be addressed to the conference chair: Prof. Francois-Xavier Gleyzon at ShakespeareandtheOrient@gmail.com
Department of English
American University of Beirut
Fisk Hall, Rm 229
PO Box 11-0236
Beirut 1107 2020 - Lebanon
The conference is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the British Council, the Anis K. Makdisi Program in Literature, the Office of the Provost, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut.

"To be or not to be" cartoon

2010-10-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

I found this political cartoon while looking for an example of sloganized use of a Hamlet quotation for a talk I'm giving at Tufts this week. Many of my American hearers have trouble believing that "to be or not to be" can be a passionate call to arms.

It's by the Palestinian artist Naji Salim Hussein al-Ali (1937-1987); you can see more of his work here: http://shaeirrahhal.jeeran.com/selections/archive/2010/6/1059177.html

Seeking video of Arab/ic Shakespeare performances

2010-10-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

The Global Shakespeares web archive at MIT has gone live -- with virtually no content on its Arab World section. There's only my placeholder introduction.
Yalla! Let's send our archivist friends some video to include in the site. Any leads can be sent to me or to Prof. Peter Donaldson, the site's editor-in-chief.

Textual fundamentalists angry at Hani Afifi for postmodern adaptation

2010-09-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

This unknown (to me) reviewer accuses the young adaptor/director Hani Afifi of "betraying Shakespeare's text," which the review (in Arabic) describes as "sacred." Afifi's I Am Hamlet is winning all kinds of prizes, including Best Actor at the 2009 CIFET.

No Othello in Tangiers

2010-08-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

I should clarify that there has been a funny linguistic misunderstanding. Back in June, while I was in Morocco, I misread "Hotel Tanja" as "Otayl Tanja," i.e., Othello -- which is easy to do, because the two are spelled identically, and because I had forgotten that Moroccans use the French word hotel instead of the classical Arabic word funduq. I was further misled by one of the plays in the volume being called Zanqat Shaksbir -- Shakespeare Street. Which turns out to be about a real street in Tangiers, with a plot very vaguely reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet but too far to be considered a Shakespeare adaptation. My friend Khalid Amine, head of the International Center for Performance Studies in Tangier set me straight. Consider it a lesson in di- or tri-glossia.

Othello from Tangiers

2010-06-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Morocco. This is the cover of a new book (apparently) titled Othello of Tangiers. By Tangiers-based writer Zoubeir Ben Bouchta.

More details soon, inshallah.

Twelfth Night in Damascus

2010-05-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

I just came across the Damascus Shakespeare Festival, and apparently it aspires to be annual. However, this year's performance of Twelfth Night by the Birmingham Theatre troupe (visiting from England) seems to have left the Syrian audience cold. The review quotes a Syrian actress named Yara Sabri wishing the show had had more music and dancing etc. to "contribute to the arts education" of a less elite audience. No surprise there. If ever there were a problematic play for cross-cultural presentation, surely Twelfth Night must be it.

TV report on Shakespeare festival in Damascus

2010-04-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

TV report here (in Arabic) on recent Shakespeare Festival held in Damascus, including Birmingham Theatre's performance of Twelfth Night.

Omar Sharif to play King Lear

2010-02-16T13:47:00.000-08:00

From Playbill.com...
Sounds wonderful. But how will they avoid allegories about sitting Egyptian presidents??

Sharif Will Star in Egyptian Film Inspired by King Lear
By Kenneth Jones
February 11, 2010
Omar Sharif, the Egyptian-born Oscar-nominated actor of Arab and French descent, will play the tragic patriarch in a film adaptation that places Shakespeare's King Lear in the modern Middle East.Variety reported that the 77-year-old actor — who starred in "Lawrence of Arabia" (for which he got an Academy Award nomination), "Funny Girl" and "Dr. Zhivago" — will play Lear, which is to be set in Egypt.
Egyptian writer Khaled Al Khamissi, who wrote the novel "Taxi," an international bestseller, will write the screenplay.
The film is being developed and produced by Frederic Sichler's Amana Creative, who was once CEO of France's StudioCanal.
Sichler is co-producing "King Lear" with Egypt's Misr Intl. and perhaps Egypt National Broadcast Corp.
"Shakespeare is an icon of European culture, Al Khamissi represents the best of a new generation of Arab writers, and Omar Sharif has been a bridge between our two worlds for half a century," producer Sichler said.
A director will be announced; shooting should begin by late 2010.
King Lear is the famed Shakespeare tragedy of an aging king who decides to divide his domain in three, among his daughters. When he denies his good daughter her share, it becomes his — and his kingdom's — undoing.

Nehad Selaiha rereads my dissertation...

2009-09-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Hamlet galore: Nehad Selaiha enjoys a Hamletian feast at the Creativity Centre
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/963/cu1.htm

Of all the foreign dramas translated into Arabic, including Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet has been the most influential since the 1950s. Not only has its language, particularly Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and phrases like "The time is out of joint" or "Frailty, thy name is woman", found its way into the rhetoric of political writers and intellectuals and even in the daily speech of the educated, it has also haunted the imagination of playwrights, directors and actors, appearing in different guises to address different needs at different historical moments. Echoes of Hamlet abound in many of the best dramas produced in the 1960s, and at least three tragedies, Alfred Farag's Sulayman Al-Halabi and Al-Zeir Salem and Salah Abdel Sabour's The Tragedy of Al-Hallaj, modeled their heroes on the Prince of Denmark, giving them more or less the same moral/political/ existential dilemmas. While the play itself has not received many 'textually unadulterated' productions -- the most famous and memorable being Sayed Bedeir's at the Opera house in 1964/65, starring the late, great Karam Metawi', and Mohamed Subhi's 1978 one, in which he also played the title role -- it has inspired a spade of stage adaptations, original plays and what can be best described as ironic, inter-textual engagements.

In her extensively researched, well informed and deeply insightful doctoral dissertation on the appropriation of Hamlet by Arab culture between 1952 and 2002 (entitled Hamlet's Arab Journey: Adventures in Political Culture and Drama, soon to be published in book form), American scholar Margaret Litvin demonstrates that the different Arab Hamlet-appropriations since the 1952 Egyptian revolution 'fall into 4 main phases' that 'have corresponded to the prevailing political moods in the region'. The first phase (1952-64) was one of 'euphoric pride after the 1952 revolution', and in it 'Arab dramatists' preoccupations with Hamlet were focused on [achieving literary and theatrical] international standards'. The second phase (1964-67) was one of 'soul-searching and impatience for progress' and 'Hamlet's incorporation into Arab political drama' then took the form of what Litvin calls (in the manuscript of her thesis, which she has graciously sent me, and from which all the above quotations and the ones that follow are taken): a '"Hamletization" of the Arab Muslim political hero'. 'Such Hamletization,' she goes on to say, 'was an easy way for Arab playwrights to emulate (and borrow) Hamlet's complexity of characterization and to obtain the moral and political standing it conferred. Thus the critical demand for deep, complex, yet politically topical characters encouraged serious dramatists to weave strands of Hamlet in their heroes -- in turn linking the character of Hamlet with the theme of earthly justice in the audience's imagination' (Litvin, pp, 12, 13. 82).

Abu Hamlet and Najm are Alive

2009-08-18T09:34:00.001-07:00

A report on a conventional/unconventional Syrian playlet in the (Abu Dhabi) National

Haven't seen it -- sounds kind of reminiscent of Moroccan playwright Nabyl Lahlou's "Ophelie N'Est Pas Morte" (1968)... but maybe funnier?

Recently, an empty shop under renovation in downtown Cairo became an impromptu theatre for an unusual performance. An audience of about 12 people sat on mismatched chairs. A few well-placed scarves and portraits of Shakespeare and the Syrian satirical writer Mohammed al Maghout formed the backdrop. Two identical young men suddenly appeared and began reciting overlapping Shakespeare monologues in Arabic.

The Malas twins, Ahmed and Mohammed, are 26-year-old actors and playwrights. Their play Melodrama, originally performed in their bedroom in Damascus, has become an underground sensation in Syria. During a visit to Cairo, they organised three performances.

In the play, Shakespeare quickly devolves into an argument between the two characters, the grey-haired Abu Hamlet (played by Mohammed) and the boisterous young Nejm, or “Star” (played by Ahmed). They are aspiring actors living in shared quarters who spend their time recounting disappointments, venting frustrations and indulging in fantasies about making it big. As their names suggest, the characters represent different generations of the Syrian acting community – the older committed to the theatre, and the younger enamoured with television and cinema.

Khalil Mutran salutes Shaykh Salama Higazi

2009-08-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

Click on photo to enlarge and read poem.
From Volume I of Khalil Mutran's diwan (4 vols, 1949), first published 1908. See last two stanzas for Mutran's admiration of Higazi's dramatic art... and desire to transcend it.

Call for Materials - Arab Shakespeare Performance

2009-07-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

The curators of the MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive (http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/, directed by Peter S. Donaldson, Professor of Literature at MIT) have expressed interest in developing an online database of Arab/ic Shakespeare performance. The site would be modeled on and linked to its recently launched site on Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPIA, http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/) The Shakespeare Electronic Archive is also developing new archives in Brazil, India and other areas.

The Asia site is still in development, so it is too early to know exactly what a proposed Arab World companion site might include. Participants can expect to have significant input into the design. That said, here are some possibilities (all would be indexed and searchable):

video clips from contemporary or older productions of Shakespeare plays and adaptations (and complete videos of selected productions)
brief summaries of significant Shakespeare productions and adaptations
a database of reviews (in both Arabic and English)
interviews with directors and actors, both young and more established, who have engaged seriously with Shakespeare
script excerpts of unpublished Shakespeare adaptations and important out-of-print Shakespeare translations
a bibliography of important scholarly work on Arab Shakespeare and Arab theatre more generally (in Arabic and English, with hyperlinks when articles are available online)

Please contact me through this blog (arabshakespeare [at] gmail.com) if you would like to be involved in the pilot stage of this project. Please also contact me if you are able to share any materials (e.g., full video recordings or clips) that would be useful in constructing a small demonstration site to solicit grant support for the project. Of course, interested scholars and MIT Shakespeare Project staff will work to obtain formal permission from the authors/directors before anything is published online.

Early Arabic Shakespeare translations

2009-06-24T06:47:00.001-07:00

This week I figured out which French translation was used by Tanyus Abdu, author of the first published Arabic Hamlet. (Hint: pick up John Pemble's very entertaining Shakespeare Goes to Paris (2005). Then spend three days at Widener comparing half a dozen 18th and 19th-c French translations.)

It's amazing no one has bothered to trace this before. It's common knowledge that the early Arabic adapters/translators of Shakespeare were mainly Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to Egypt who knew French better than English and had absorbed the neo-classical aesthetics of French theatre. It's even known that the earliest Arabic versions of Shakespeare were translated not from English but from French. (No surprise there -- same thing happened in Russian, in Spanish, probably in plenty of other languages. Paris, capital of the 19th century, etc., etc.)

But... doesn't this matter? Every critic and scholar I've seen notes the French mediation, then proceeds as though it never happened. They spill ink deploring or defending the "distortions" introduced by early adapters, especially Abdu and Mutran -- without considering which of these distortions (like Abdu's much-mocked happy ending!) were already present in their French sources. What a waste. Stop seeing it as a simple two-way exchange between Shakespeare and his Arab translator, and the literary argument about textual fidelity falls apart; even the Bourdieusian sociological argument (adaptation to the needs of Cairo's emerging middle-class commercial theatre audience, then pursuit of autonomous aesthetic standards, etc.) can be made in a considerably more complicated and fruitful way.

Brooklyn June 11

2009-06-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn June 11 was a lot of fun. The audience was pretty big, and full of people who asked smart questions and seemed really to like the show. So did NYT's Ben Brantley. (And wrote a really perceptive review, I thought.)

Here is also my backgrounder, written in a big hurry at the Asia Society's request. Most of this will be news to no one who reads this blog. Except maybe this nugget:

In 1935, Egypt’s future president Gamal Abdel Nasser starred in a production of
Julius Caesar put on at his Cairo high school. He played Caesar as a liberating
nationalist hero who defeated Great Britain.

It's true! Check Georges Vaucher or Joel Gordon or any good Nasser biography.

Al-Bassam hits New York

2009-06-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Theatre preview capsule by Ben Brantley (NYT 6/5/09)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/arts/07weekahead.html
Winters of discontent occur in even the sunniest climes. The Kuwaiti-born director SULAYMAN AL-BASSAM has relocated Shakespeare’s demonic Richard III to the Middle East, and this bloodiest of monarchs apparently feels gleefully at home in his new surroundings. Part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas” festival, “RICHARD III: AN ARAB TRAGEDY,” which opens Tuesday at the Harvey Theater, was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its 2007 Complete Works Festival. It has now arrived in the States (stopping off at the Kennedy Center in Washington this year) with its message of the utterly contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s tale of a country raped and paralyzed by a charismatic sociopath. Mr. Bassam has written that “Richard III” has always fascinated him more as history than tragedy. The emphasis in his production, set in an unnamed Gulf emirate, is accordingly less on the psychology than the society of the crookback who would be king (who first appears under the name of Emir Gloucester, if you please). He is, Mr. Bassam says, “the twisted child of a demented history.” Arab music and ritual infuse this “Richard III,” which is performed in Arabic with English titles and seems guaranteed to summon images of the reign of Saddam Hussein and its chaotic aftermath. Tuesday through Friday, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100, bam.org; $25 to $45.
[Will I see BB at the show? Will be sure to keep you posted. -ML]

Village Voice previews Al-Bassam's RIII

2009-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Al-Bassam's Richard III: An Arab Tragedy will be at BAM in New York next week. Check out this brief piece by Alexis Sokolsky in their summer theatre preview. (I'm quoted!)

My review of CIFET

2009-04-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Just out in the new PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/performing_arts_journal/v031/31.2.litvin.html

War Stories, Language Games, and Struggle for Recognition
Located on the Nile Corniche, the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel reveals only a picture-window slice of Cairo. Guests of this year's Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (CIFET) entered a security fortress: concrete barriers, bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and handbag searches. Inside, the cappuccinos were perfect; the sunset, through a double filter of pollution and tinted glass, looked magical. Some visitors wondered if this wasn't too sumptuous a place for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to lodge the foreign guests it had invited for the festival's accompanying three-day seminar on "Challenges Facing the Independent Theatre and Threats to Its Survival." Having lived for a year (2001-2002) as a student in a rooftop flat in downtown Cairo, listening to a constant din of mosque loudspeakers and taxi horns, I appreciated the change of scene that came with being an invited seminar...

More in
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92), pp. 65-71
Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92) The MIT Press. 20th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre , Cairo, Egypt, October 10-20, 2008.

Al-Bassam's RIII plays in the Gulf

2009-03-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

Sulayman Al-Bassam speaks to The National (Abu Dhabi) ahead of the UAE performance of Richard III: An Arab Tragedy. http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090319/ART/799109576/1042/SPORT

Some nice bits:

I think one of the good things about the piece is that you don’t need to
know Shakespeare to appreciate it. I think a lot of people in the Arab world
have never come across Richard III,” says al Bassam.

Really? It would be interesting to ask an audience member who has never heard the plot of Shakespeare's Richard III what s/he got out of Al-Bassam's play. I think it would lose a lot of its depth without the York/Lancaster background.

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is hardly the first reimagining of Shakespeare’s
popular play. The Elizabethan tale of unbridled power lust has been set in Nazi
Germany, in a crime-ridden American ghetto and even rendered in Japanese
animation, or manga, as a graphic novel. This, however, is the first time that
Richard III speaks in Arabic while in the contemporary Arabian Gulf, and al
Bassam worked with a number of writers and a poet who specialises in Bedouin
verse to get the cadence of the English adapted into Arabic. He says his focus
was capturing the rhythm, if not the word-by-word translation, of Shakespearean
verse.

The claims for the novelty and cultural representativeness of this adaptation have been scaled down over the past two years, I'm glad to report.

Because of its bilingual presentation, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy can seem
at times to be two plays in one. “For the Arab audiences, they are much more
tuned into the comedy of the piece and there is a quite comic element. So
the satirical elements come out a lot more clearly when we play to Arab
audiences,” says al Bassam. “Some of the western audiences, because of their
unfamiliarity with the culture that is being presented, they are a little
bit shy of laughing.”

This is a great point. They're shy (and so they should be! Isn't this hesitation before laughing at stereotypes of the other exactly what our post-Saidian culturally sensitive university teaching strives to inculcate?), and they can't always distinguish what's meant as satire from what's meant as straight documentary presentation of cultural facts. Which is not their fault. But it's a fact.

Hard not to feel that Sulayman has gotten a lot savvier about the way the same piece plays to different audiences. Well, 35 performances in nine (or is it more?) countries would do that for you.

Call for Papers - Arab Shakespeare in Prague, July 2011

2009-03-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

Rafik Darragi and I are co-convening this seminar at the next WSC. Co-conspirators welcome. Prague should be lovely... Please send a 250-word abstract by August 1, 2009 to mlitvin@bu.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS
9th World Shakespeare Congress
Prague, July 17-21, 2011

Seminar: Shakespeare on the Arab Stage

In many Arab countries, top directors and playwrights have appropriated Shakespearean characters and/or plots to produce original theatrical works. Their plays range from parody and pastiche to metatheatrical reflection, political satire, and even tragedy. Such work is now gaining prominence in the West as well as in the Arab world. For instance, an Iraqi dramatist’s adaptation of Hamlet received a rehearsed reading at the 8th World Shakespeare Congress in 2006. The same year, an “Arab” version of Richard III was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, later touring to several European countries and the United States.
Building on the enthusiasm and questions sparked by the Arab Shakespeare panel at the previous World Shakespere Congress (Brisbane, 2006), this seminar will explore the diverse dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare that have flourished in the Arab world in recent years. Participants are invited to:

Analyze one or more Arab/ic productions or adaptations of Shakespeare plays (19th- or 20th-century or contemporary).
Consider the production and/or reception contexts of one or more Arab/ic Shakespeare appropriations.
Contribute to a discussion that aims to develop a typology or map of Arab Shakespeare appropriation more broadly. Given the perfectly naturalized status of Shakespeare’s plays in some Arab theatre cultures and their “foreigner” status in others, what generalizations about “Arab” Shakespeare should be made or avoided?
Help pinpoint some relevant paradigms for theorizing this young but growing sub-field of Shakespeare studies. In particular: is “intercultural appropriation” a fruitful theoretical approach at all?

Background
Until recently, scholars of “worldwide Shakespeare appropriation” have known little about such work. For decades, the Arab world went largely unnoticed in the numerous edited volumes on “intercultural” or “foreign” Shakespeare; Arab scholars at international Shakespeare conferences were a rare sight. When scholars in the West did bring “Arab Shakespeare” to their colleagues’ attention, they presented it almost as a novelty. (Sometimes they did not hesitate to draw easy laughs by invoking the old joke that Shakespeare was really a crypto-Arab, “Shaykh Zubayr.”) Only in the past few years has this situation begun to change, with well-received studies on and productions of Arabic Shakespeare-related plays. This seminar will celebrate that change and build on it, asking what the study of Arab Shakespeare can bring to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation more broadly.

Hamlet Without Hamlet planned in Iraq

2009-03-17T14:48:00.001-07:00

Monadhil Daood, who plays Catesby in Al-Bassam's Richard III, confirmed to me that he plans to direct an adaptation of the play Hamlit bila hamlit (“Hamlet without Hamlet”) at the Iraqi National Theatre in the coming months.

The 1992 absurdist Hamlet spin-off, by Kirkuk-born poet-playwright Khaz'al al-Majidi (b. 1951), opens with news of Hamlet’s death by shipwreck on his way from Wittenberg to his father’s funeral. (Full text here: http://www.masraheon.com/294.htm) Directed at the Iraqi National Theatre in 1997 by Naji 'abd al-Amir, Hamlit bila hamlit continues to be produced throughout the Arab world. Michel Cerda and Haytham Abderrazak directed it in Paris in 2007. Monadhil Daood says his version, which will be the inaugural play for his Baghdad Theatre Company, will adapt al-Majidi's script quite a lot and will incorporate aspects of ta'ziya (Shi'a passion plays for the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn). Incidentally, Daood's doctoral dissertation on ta'ziya theatre, written in Arabic and defended in Moscow in the late 1990s, is available through interlibrary loan.

Updates on the Iraqi National Theatre available here.

Review of Al-Bassam's R3 in DC

2009-03-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to report that our Arab Shakespeare panel last week went very well, thanks to the gracious moderating of Kristin Johnsen-Neshati and the wry presence of Michael Kahn of the Washington Shakespeare Theatre. ("Shakespeare's culture is foreign to me, too, as an American, even though I may speak his language. I've always thought it would be liberating not to be bound by his language...") Good attendance and interesting questions, too.

That night, the WaPo reviewer had mixed impressions of the show.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030801643.html?hpid=artsliving
He's not wrong...
Since I last saw the show (Stratford 2007), Sulayman has made a major change in a key character, the US ambassador/General Richmond. He has fused the two (hard power in the Middle East is no longer even nominally separate from soft power, it seems) and brought in Nigel Barratt (the creepy Arms Dealer from his Al-Hamlet Summit) to play the resulting US official. Then in the last few days before the Kennedy Center opening (I am told), he rejiggered Mr. Richmond 180 degrees, from a sleazy Arms Dealer-type operator into a total incompetent schlub of an apparatchik: bathrobe&slippers, coffee mug, vaguely phrased Evangelical convictions expressed in a sloppy drawl. The idea of the bumbling occupier (not malicious, just high-handedly clueless) was nice, but the product wasn't quite fully cooked when I saw it. Barratt's acting seemed parodic: way too broad for the Kennedy Center audience, one as finely attuned to political semiotics as any you'd find in Damascus. It had none of the subtlety of Fayez Kazak's Richard or Monadhil Daoud's Catesby. I think they will surely tone it down for the BAM performance in June.

Meanwhile, the trail of journalists and documentarians around Sulayman continues to grow. At a post-show reception I met someone making a documentary film about him. (There have been others.) "Ah, hello. So you're my competition!" he said when I introduced myself as an academic who has written on Al-Bassam. (Hmmm.) And have I already posted the link to this segment on PBS' NewsHour? (Part of their very extensive coverage of the festival.)

Kuwaiti Theater Director Finds Modern Inspiration in Shakespeare
In the second of a series of reports on the Arabesque arts festival at the Kennedy
Center, Jeffrey Brown talks to Kuwaiti writer and theater director Sulayman al-Bassam, whose company is presenting a Shakespeare play with a twist, "Richard III: An Arab Tragedy."
Transcript and streaming video here.

Ideas of beauty

2009-03-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

Off the Shakespeare topic, but some more from the festival: an exhibit of wedding dresses from various Arab countries (some lent by the wives of Gulf-country ambassadors!)...

...and a wonderful exhibit called Cinema by an artist called Youssef Nabil, exploring his love affair with Egyptian movies. These are photos of friends and starlets silk-screened onto body pillows! (There were other photos on the walls, all very striking work.)

In general the exhibits at the festival (too bad it closes today!) were remarkable.