Special Issue on Global Shakespeares, reviews of Al-Bassam and Achour plays

Shakespeare (The British Shakespeare Association) Volume 9, Issue 3, September 2013

Special Issue on Global Shakespeares, edited by Alexander Huang

Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rshk20/current#.UkR-NSR57rg

Video clips that accompany the articles are available on: http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/

If interested in reading an article from the issue please contact Alex Huang (acyhuang05@gmail.com)

ARTICLES

Global Shakespeares as Methodology

Alexander C. Y. Huang
pages 273-290

Having reached a critical mass of participants, performances and the study of Shakespeare in different cultural contexts are changing how we think about globalization. The idea of global Shakespeares has caught on because of site-specific imaginations involving early modern and modern Globe theatres that aspired to perform the globe. Seeing global Shakespeares as a methodology rather than as appendages of colonialism, as political rhetorics, or as centerpieces in a display of exotic cultures situates us in a postnational space that is defined by fluid cultural locations rather than by nation-states. This framework helps us confront archival silences in the record of globalization, understand the spectral quality of citations of Shakespeare and mobile artworks, and reframe the debate about cultural exchange. Global Shakespeares as a field registers the shifting locus of anxiety between cultural particularity and universality. The special issue explores the promise and perils of political articulations of cultural difference and suggests new approaches to performances in marginalized or polyglot spaces.

Hamlet, the Heike and the Fall of Troy

Peter S. Donaldson
pages 291-303

 

Postcolonial hybridity: The making of a Bollywood Lear in London

Kinga Földváry
pages 304-312

 

Caribbean tricksters at crossroads: Davlin Thomas's Lear Ananci and Hamlet: The Eshu Experience

Giselle Rampaul
pages 313-321

 

European touring stars and the Shakespearean distinction of the Spanish actor-manager in Madrid and Latin America (1898–1936)

Juan F. Cerdá
pages 322-329

 

What's global about global Shakespeare? The case of Perttu Leppä's 8 päivää ensi-iltaan (8 Days to the Premiere)

Nely Keinänen
pages 330-338

 

 

REVIEWS

Review of Sua Incelença, Ricardo III (directed by Gabriel Villela for Clowns de Shakespeare) at Largo da Ordem, Curitiba, Brazil, 29 March 2011

Anna S. Camati & Liana C. Leão
pages 339-341

 

Review of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (directed by Silviu Purcarete), the National Theater in Craiova, Romania, 14 March 1992

Lucian Ghita
pages 342-346

 

Review of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (Directed by Anirudh Nair and Neel Chaudhuri for The Tadpole Repertory and Wide Aisle Productions), Zorba the Buddha Performance Space, Ghitorni, New Delhi, India, 3 March 2013

Jyotsna Singh
pages 347-349

 

Review of The Speaker's Progress (directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam), Paramount Theatre, Boston, USA, October 12-16, 2011

Margaret Litvin
pages 350-352

 

Review of La Tempestad (directed by John Mowat for the Companhia do Chapitô) at the Corral de Comedias, Almagro, Spain, 23 July 2011

Carla Della Gatta
pages 353-355

 

Review of Hamlet or Three Boys and One Girl (adapted and directed by Nikolay Georgiev and the @lma @lter Student Theatre-Laboratory) at the Theatre Hall of Sofia University, Bulgaria, 12 March 2013

Georgi Niagolov
pages 356-358

 

Review of Shakespeare and APA's Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History (directed by Lotfi Achour) and the company's talkback at Re-making Shakespeare for the World Shakespeare Festival at the Northern Stage, Newcastle, UK, 14 July 2012

Saffron J. Walkling & Raphael Cormack
pages 359-361

 

Review of Robert Lewis' Red Hamlet (directed by Robert Lewis) for the Group Theatre, New York, October 1933

Jeffrey Butcher
pages 362-364

 

Review of Shakespeare's Othello (directed by Nikos Charalambous for the Cyprus Theatre Organization) at Latsia Municipal Theatre, Nicosia, Cyprus, 27 November 2010

Eleni Pilla
pages 365-366

 

 

 

REVIEW ARTICLE

Giving a “Local Habitation” to “Airy Nothing”: Review of the Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive

Haylie Brooke Swenson
pages 367-372

Al-Bassam at BU

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

Trailer: Richard III: An Arab VIP

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):

Review of documentary on Al-Bassam's Richard III

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

Documentary about Al-Bassam's Richard III

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.

Al-Assadi's "Forget Hamlet" in Kuwait

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).

Clips from Al-Bassam's Twelfth Night adaptation

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.)

Al-Bassam on Speaker's Progress in The Guardian

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.

My students email with Sulayman Al-Bassam

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

Brooklyn June 11

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

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

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!)

Al-Bassam's Richard III staged in Kuwait

As far as I know, this is the first staging in the Arab world of one of Sulayman Al-Bassam's Arabic-language Shakespeare adaptations."Unfortunately it was staged for only three nights at the Dar Al-Athar Al-Islamiya, while it played for months in different countries," Al-Bassam noted during a seminar on the play held at Kuwait University's Faculty of Arts. The Kuwait Times has a little article about it.

Holderness on Al-Bassam

Graham Holderness has an article on Sulayman Al-Bassam's Shakespeare adaptations in the current European Journal of English Studies (Vol 12, No. 1, April 2008 , 59 - 77). Abstract:

This article addresses the writing and performance work of Anglo-Kuwaiti director Sulayman Al-Bassam, tracing the development of his various adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet into English and Arabic 'cross-cultural' versions between 2001 and 2007. Al-Bassam's work presents English as a 'language in translation'. His works move from early modern to modern English, from Arabized English to Arabic, from one linguistic and geographical location to another, their forms moulded and remoulded by complex cultural pressures. The study focuses on specific examples from three adaptations to show in practice how in these works English is 'constantly crossed, challenged and contested'.