"A Graduate of Trouble" (Zuabi, cast as the Palestinian director)

I'm getting curious again about Amir Nizar Zuabi's Comedy of Errors, which I haven't seen, although it has been playing all spring and summer.

Sylvia Morris (on her The Shakespeare Blog) found it "unnecessarily violent," and the Guardian's reviewer found it "startling":

The most startling feature of The Comedy of Errors, directed by the Palestinian Amir Nizar Zuabi, is its emphasis on the play's cruelty. Ephesus is clearly a police state in which a captured merchant is subjected to water torture, bodies are unceremoniously dumped in canals, and the Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio arrive in a crate as illegal immigrants; even domestic relationships are tinged with violence. I wish the verse had more room to breathe, but Zuabi pushes the action along at a great rate and, in Bruce Mackinnon and Felix Hayes as the twin servants, boasts two of the best Dromios I have seen: the former all quivering apprehension, the latter brimming with goofy charm.

The "younger generation," meanwhile, called the show "the RSC at its best: funny, professional and original, and it made Shakespeare modern and understandable."
Unlike the other Arab items in the "World" Shakespeare Festival, this one is not billed by national origin (e.g., it is not performed in Arabic, nor localized to anyplace in the Middle East), but Zuabi's Palestinian background is very much at stake in the expectations and actual direction of his show.  Here is the RSC's promotional "mini-documentary."  (Is it because tickets cost so much now that theatre companies feel they have to give risk-averse buyers so much info up front? Or is this because everyone has a phone that wants to research everything before experiencing it?)

Listen to David Farr (around 0:26): "I wanted to find another artist to add color, ... contribution. I was obviously interested in finding a director who had a very particular emotional and political contribution to bring, something that would be different from me.  I had seen the work of Amir Nizar Zuabi..." In the explanation that follows he uses the word "obviously" at least once more: a Palestinian director has a very strong connection to the idea of exile and not being on one's own land, and the play is all about exile etc etc.  So the selection of Zuabi itself functions as a reading of the play.
And Zuabi (around 0:58) steps right into the role for which he is cast:
"Coming from where I come, of course the whole thing of being illegal somewhere has a very strong echo."
Then at 1:22:

I'm a graduate of trouble back home. [Nice line!]  And of course our political strife, which can become very very horrible at times, is also very very funny. ... That sense of making the comedy real -- you know, they're running for their lives, they're not running to be funny -- makes a lot of sense to me.

And then he trots out his line about how Shakespeare is actually a Palestinian (already discussed on this blog), which is really a universality claim.

One should try to do justice to the other underlying claims here.
The idea of cutting Shakespeare through a Palestinian prism to restore the "anxiety" and thus the "humanity" under the shopworn slapstick of a play like Comedy of Errors: an interesting, plausible, appealing idea.  Not very kind to the Palestinian perhaps (he is objectified as nothing more than the embodiment of a point of view) -- might it be more humane not to use a real person for that but only a notional Palestinian, or perhaps any human being who has read some Edward Said?  Why couldn't David Farr have done it himself?  But it can make for fine theatre.  Not so different from Anthony Tatlow's theory of how an "intercultural sign" is a familiar sign refracted through the culture of the other to make it speak again: to make Shakespeare vivid by alienating/exiling his text from some terrain that has grown too familiar.
All this, self-reflexively enough, occurs on the very subject of shipwrecks and washing up on strange shores.  (The play is billed as part of "Shakespeare's Shipwreck Trilogy" -- a nice grouping! -- under the tagline "What Country, Friends, is This?"  David Farr directs The Tempest and Twelfth Night.
Back to Zuabi: his cultural politics are as sophisticated as anyone's (and see his nice quote in here.)  A politically-minded presentist interpretation of an over-the-top early Shakespeare comedy is obviously ("obviously") what he was hired to do. But it may also be the realization of a personal artistic vision.  And although working with the RSC must be an amazing career opportunity, let's not exaggerate: the RSC quite possibly gains more cred from bringing him on than he gains from the experience.  Zuabi has done high-profile projects before, and with more artistic liberty (e.g., in casting).  Notably, he directed Palestinian actor Makram Khoury in al-Hakawati Theatre's adaptation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's intensely private and poetic late composition Jidariyya (Mural): it toured internationally in 2008. (The Guardian review of the Edinburgh festival performance, the obverse of their Comedy of Errors review (different reviewer) reveals a mismatch between audience and play -- apparently the poetry had too much "room to breathe."  It's a question of communities of interpretation.  See, e.g., the reviewer's mock-generous allowance that Darwish's death -- which was grieved by poetry lovers on four continents! -- "prompted candlelit vigils throughout Ramallah".)
From the photos and the generation gap in the reviews, it also seems like Zuabi puts on a somewhat more rollicking Shakespeare production than these heavy background political concerns would lead one to expect.
Okay, so I am loath to believe that any Comedy of Errors, no matter how interesting, could be worth a red-eye to London and a train ride to Stratford.  But doesn't it sound like I need to interview Zuabi now? As part of my sub-specialization in intercultural 35-year-old wunderkinds?  Will try to make it happen.

Is Shakespeare, after all, a Palestinian?

Perhaps you've seen my exchange with Gaza-based English professor Refaat Alareer on the idea of Hamlet as a "regular Palestinian guy." Now we can broaden the identification to Shakespeare himself.
Eschewing any hint of the "Shaykh Zubayr" nonsense,  Palestinian director Amir Nizar Zuabi lays it out:

It is a well-known fact that Shakespeare is a Palestinian. And when I say "is" I do mean "is", not "was". The man might have been born in Stratford-upon-Avon four centuries ago, but he is alive and well today in Aida refugee camp, not far from the church of the nativity in Bethlehem. Shakespeare scholars may dispute this. But the reason I say this with such conviction (and even dare, sometimes, to believe it) is that, reading his plays, I have a sense of familiarity that can only come from compatriots.
...
When I think, too, of what Shakespeare writes about, I become totally convinced by his Palestinian-ness, preposterous though this might seem at first glance. There are not a lot of places where the absolute elasticity of mankind is more visible then in the Palestinian territories. In the span of one day, you might find himself reading a book in the morning, then in the afternoon be involved in what feels like a full-scale war; by dinner you and your wife have a lengthy discussion about the quality of that book, and just before you slip into bed there is still time to witness another round of violence before you tuck the children into bed. This mad reality blends everything – injustice with humour, anger with grace, compassion with clairvoyance, comedy with tragedy. For me this is the essence of Shakespeare's writing; and the essence, too, of being Palestinian.

Read the rest: it's great.  There's some cultural generalizing all right, "blazing sun" and "rhythms of the Quran" and all that... but artists, unlike academics, are allowed such thinking. 

It strikes me that the kind of identification Zuabi is performing works in the opposite direction from Prof. Alareer's.  Whereas the teacher aims to get his students to care about Shakespeare by bringing it closer to their lives (a domesticating or appropriation move, in the best sense), the director wants to get Brits to rethink what they "know" about the Palestinians, appropriating the great cultural hero of Western drama to do it. (I'm just guessing "elasticity" is not top on the list of qualities most Brits, even Guardian readers, tend to ascribe to Palestinians.)
Zuabi's is a classic national-liberationist or recently postcolonial appropriation of Shakespeare.  (My book, in a different way, makes the same move: using something my Anglo-American intended readers think they know to defamiliarize and reorient what they know about "Arab culture.")  Check out the toxic reader comments under Zuabi's post, and you can see why this sort of possibly neurotic-seeming self-identificatory move might still be necessary.  The comments also highlight that Zuabi's appropriation works in yet another opposite direction from one like Sulayman Al-Bassam's Al-Hamlet Summit: one reader absurdly (he thinks) quips: "Hard to imagine Hamlet with a suicide belt, somehow" (he obviously didn't see this one).  The difference is that Al-Bassam's show reoriented how some Brits saw Shakespeare, not how they saw contemporary Arab realities.

Zuabi is currently directing Comedy of Errors at the RSC. I won't get to see it, but you should. (It might be interesting to compare his production to the Afghan one in London. Hey you grad students out there!)

 Many thanks to Amahl Bishara for the link.

"Shakespeare in Kabul"

Outside the Arab/ic focus of this blog, but subject to a similar cultural tug-of-war (and I don't mean anything to do with Islam), is the story of "Shakespeare in Kabul."

In the bookshop of the National Theatre in London two weeks ago I saw a book by this title; alongside a photo of a gorgeous Afghan actress silently painting her eyelashes are the names of the authors, Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar. In self-consciously dramatic prose (with section headings like "Exposition" and "Climax"), the book tells the story of an Afghan production of Love's Labour's Lost directed by French actress and Peter Brooks Mahabharata alumna Corinne Jaber.  It has been well received, with good distribution and very warm reviews so far.  (Preview it here - and do download the "annex.")

I had a chance to meet Mr. Landrigan during Jaber's brief residency at my university last spring. He showed up to her events wearing a pakol (Afghan hat - think Ahmad Shah Masood) and kept interrupting the conversation, waxing nostalgic about the rehearsal photos, generally taking rhetorical ownership of a production in which his actual role seems to have been limited to helping adapt the script.

Later he went to Ms. Jaber's hotel. He was, apparently, trying to persuade her to collaborate on the book. She refused, but somehow he enlisted Qais Akbar Omar (whom I haven't met and whose story I don't know), who I believe was the production's assistant director.  Their finished book carries a self-serving postscript acknowledging Jaber's non-cooperation and "wishing her well."

Anyone else want to exploit Afghan Shakespeare for reputational gain? Take a number!


As Corinne Jaber's follow-up show, a Comedy of Errors in Dari developed for London's Globe-to-Globe festival, prepares to take the stage later this month, the Globe's web site is touting the Afghan company's work as "a theatrical miracle."  Meanwhile, I was just forwarded (by two separate friends) a query from an academic listserv asking which theatre- and Mideast-related journals might want to review Shakespeare in Kabul. Well hidden (edited to sound bites) but still findable in all this promo are the voices that are really refreshing to hear -- not so much Ms. Jaber's, though she is a very warm, resourceful, and ferociously articulate artist -- but those of the women and men who took a certain reputational risk to act in these shows.They don't make it sound so miraculous. This from the interview with actor Nabi Tanha reprinted in the online appendix to the Haus volume:

1. How did participating in the play affect your life?
Normal. Nothing special.

2. Had you heard of Shakespeare before deciding to take part in the staging of Love’s Labour’s Lost?
Of course. When I was in Kabul University, Faculty of Fine Arts, we did many plays by Shakespeare. But the ones I remember very well, and which we rehearsed for weeks, were Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Apart from Shakespeare’s plays, we did other plays by other playwrights too, such as Prometheus Bound by a Greek playwright, Aeschylus, and some plays by M. Gorki and Brecht, who I believe is a German playwright. Beckett was another playwright whose plays we worked on.

The female actors had pretty similar things to say, depending what generation they were from. As with every theatre project, the youngest participants were the ones whose lives were changed most.  But almost everyone was pretty matter-of-fact, avoiding the chance to pontificate in response to silly questions like "What impact do you think staging Shakespeare in Afghanistan might have on the relationship between two cultures?" (What two cultures?)

Want more info before you make up your mind about the shows, the book, and the project? The Christian Science Monitor's 2005 review of LLL is here. The Economist called it "magic." You can find links to more press coverage of that production here (scroll all the way down), under a puffy interview with Shakespeare appropriation scholar Irena Makaryk.  Disregard the tone set by her university's PR department: Makaryk has published a thoughtful article wondering, among other things, whose cultural agenda/s the Kabul production served: Makaryk, Irena R. “'Brief candle'? Shakespeare in Afghanistan.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, Performance 6 (21) / 7 (22) (2010): 81-113.
And an interesting piece by my colleague Bill Carroll draws on interviews with Jaber to analyze directorial choices such as what to do about the "masque of Muscovites" (!) and why foreigners, but NOT the Afghan participants, would tend to read the young lords' ascetic vows as Taliban-like. See Carroll, William. "Love's Labour's Lost in Afghanistan," Shakespeare Bulletin, 2010.

Afghan Shakespeare in Globe's series

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.