Academic article on Arab Shakespeares for British audiences

Happy to report that three years after the theatre festivals it analyzes, the article I co-authored with Saffron Walkling and Raphael Cormack for the Routledge journal Shakespeare is live: 

Margaret Litvin, Saffron Walkling & Raphael Cormack (2015): Full of noises: when “World Shakespeare” met the “ArabSpring.” Shakespeare.

We look from various angles at Ashtar's Richard II, Monadhil Daood's Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, and APA's Macbeth: Laila and Ben--A Bloody History.
First 50 readers can download an eprint here.

"South Sudan: To Be or Not to Be"

A Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a documentary film about (I gather) the troupe behind the South Sudanese Cymbeline that played in 2012 at the Globe in London. Details and video here.

"Prutus fall on sord for bolitical reason"

Here is Anthony Thwaite's "Girdle Round the Earth," the poem with which I'll open my MLA paper this year. 
For a wonderful video of Thwaite reading and discussing it (and yes, he does the ethnic accents), see Francis Gilbert's interview here.

Girdle Round the Earth

'King Rear was foorish man his girls make crazy'
Says something certainly about the play.
'Prutus fall on sord for bolitical reason'
Is unambiguous, though not the way
We native-speakers might have put it, who share
A language with the undoubted global poet.
In Tokyo or Benghazi, he abides
Our questioning syllabus still, will never stay
For an answer as the candidates all stare
Into the glossaried cryptograms he hides.

O Saku Seppiya, Shakhs Bey-er, O you
Who plague the schools and universities
From Patagonia to Pakistan,
From Thailand to Taiwan, how would it please
Your universal spirit to look down
And see the turbans and burnouses bent
Above your annotated texts, or see
Simplified Tales from Lamb by slow degrees
Asphyxiate the yellow and the brown?
To pick up the quotation, 'thou art free'---

But Matthew Arnold, schools inspector, who
Saw you 'self-school'd, self-scann'd', could not have known
How distantly from Stratford and the Globe
With British Council lecturers you've flown:
Midsummer Nights in Prague and Kathmandu,
Polonius stabbed dressed in a gallabiyah,
Shylock the Palestinian refugee,
And Hamlet's father's Serbo-Croat groan,
Dunsinane transported to Peru,
Kabuki for All's Well, Noh for King Lear.

'To be or not to be. Is that a question?'
The misquotations littering the page,
The prose translations fingermarked with sweat,
You prove again, world-wide, 'not of an age
But for all time', the English Ala' ad-Din,
The Western Chikamatsu, more than both
And different from either, somehow worth
Those sun-baked hours in echoing lecture-halls,
On torn tatami or dune-drifted stage:
'Lady Macbeth is houswif full of sin',
'Prince Hel is drinkard tho of nobel berth.'

The back story is fun:

More on the dabke Henry V

Another preview piece here, with a beautiful photo:

Oualid Khelifi writes:

 Unique both in substance and style, the piece unwinds its twists and turns through a sleek coalescence between Palestinian folk hoof (‘dabke’), contemporary dance and accompanying visuals. It is all the more atmospheric when the cast moves to traditional local music wed to beats of Dave Randall, an artist from British electronic bands Faithless and Slovo, who has composed exclusive material for Al-Zaytouna. Shakespearian chorus does not dominate the lines either; the performance also boasts some verses of Palestinian poetry by virtuoso Mahmoud Darwich.

 More about the company on its web site.

Could Arafat dance? A dabke Henry V

Another Arab Shakespeare show in London: a Palestinian dabke dance adaptation of Henry V.  Yes, you heard that right.  This time by a Britain-based company, not one brought in for a festival.

The UK-based Palestinian dabke theatre group Al Zaytouna will present its new production entitled Unto the Breach, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V set in modern-day Palestine. The show, directed by Ahmed Masoud and co-directed by Hadjer Nacer, will be performed in London in November 2012. Al Zaytouna board member Souraya Qabbani gave the following interview ahead of the full production's debut.

 Read the Palestine Chronicle interview here.

 I would have thought of Arafat as more a King Lear figure, but here he is transparently allegorized as Henry V.  That takes some dance steps indeed:

Q- Although King Henry V, at one point in the original play, comes to the humble realisation that he is but a man; he is nevertheless the person responsible for rallying his men to victory. How does that reconcile with your show, given that: a- Yasser Arafat, who in the director's words is "the great figurehead of the Palestinian struggle", has died before managing to lead his people to liberty; and b- The Arab Spring, which you cite as among the inspirations for the show, had been sparked without any outstanding movement leaders?
Whilst the launch of Unto the Breach coincides with the anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, and there are parallels between our depiction of the Chairman and that of the late Palestinian leader, the show is not a historical account of his life. It does, however reflect on the value of a figurehead such as Arafat, in uniting people behind a common cause, enabling them to stand up for their rights and to stake their claim for sovereignty on a world stage. The show recognises this value but also acknowledges that the Palestinians have not yet achieved their objectives, and so the Chairman in our production dies without securing the liberty that he craved for his people. The achievement of victory is thus far less clear-cut in Unto the Breach than it is in Shakespeare’s Henry V. 
In the show, the Chairman’s death leaves the Palestinians without a leader, and so the onus is on them to once again rise up and claim their rights.  The idea that this is possible – that people can bring about change if they unite and call for it with a common voice - flowed strongly from the Arab Spring, and inspired us to create the show.  Although we recognise that any such struggle is fraught with difficulties, it is this idea of hope that continues to drive us forwards.

Full video for Ashtar's Richard II

I forgot whether I mentioned this before: For a limited time (a few months only, expiring this fall), you can see (and perhaps figure out how to download?) a full video recording of Ashtar Theatre's Richard II through this link: http://thespace.org/items/e0000612?t=fksb.
A few of the other plays from the Globe-to-Globe festival are available there as well. 
The Space is a cool semi-governmental initiative launched around the Olympics, through a partnership of (among others?) the England Arts Council and the BBC.
They've also got part of Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad.

Early reviews of the Tunisian Macbeth

The surtitles caused problems, but the show seems to have been effective at least in stimulating people's emotions, if not in teaching them anything very new about Tunisia or Shakespeare. The big achievement - scenographically as well as politically - seems to have been the commentary on the "puppet" nature of Ben Ali's regime: a puppet to Bourghiba, to his wife, to the authoritarian structure of events demanding a dictator to come and fill the space.

Ibrahim Darwish's long column (in Arabic) focuses on the dis/similarities between Shakespeare's Macbeth (motivated by ambition and some idea of masculinity) and the Tunisian Ben Ali; he also highlights the production's critique of the original sins of the Bourghiba regime, conveyed through inter-scene documentary footage (including discussion of Ibn Khaldun), the voice of the narrator, and the puppet show.

A kind but ambivalent blog review by Miriam Gillinson (also here) faults the show for trying to overload on ideas, but somehow settles on the cliche of praising the "simple" and "raw" (not to mention "pulsing" and "throbbing") qualities of African-produced theatre. I think the song she refers to at the end is Abu Qasim al-Shabbi's poem, "If a people one day wanted life" (multiple translations and discussion here), which has played such an important part in the Arab uprisings:

But then the production veers off again, now focusing on the strange power that Bourguiba still holds over his predecessor, Ben Ali. This has promise – after all, the idea of regal ghosts haunting their successors has a rich, Shakespearean twang to it. There’s a wonderfully weird scene, in which a larger than life model of Bourguiba taunts Ben Ali, mocking his achievements. But this idea is sustained only for a few minutes before the show scampers off again, eagerly in pursuit of other ideas.
The most effective scenes are the seemingly slight ones – the simple scenes that, almost incidentally, throb with immediate meaning. There are a number of wrenching songs that say far more about Tunisia and its trapped citizens than the rest of the show put together. The style of singing – the same singing you hear calling people to prayer at mosques – pulses with revealing contradictions. That searing wailing sounds pained but resilient, too.  It’s a little bit ugly but there’s also a raw beauty and power to the music, which screams out on behalf of all those citizens who have neither the strength or means to make themselves heard.

Another reviewer's experience provokes a diatribe against subtitles:

Throughout, the giant screen at the back keeps up a running subtitle commentary in rather disjointed English. It is more confusing than enlightening and muddles the effect of all of the hard work by the actors. The screen is so big that reading full sentences really gives your eyes a work-out and there are parts where they flash by so fast it is a struggle to keep up. Why choose to base a production on such a well-known Shakespeare, if you then feel you have to provide a word-for-word translation to keep people up to speed?

For more on the show, including pictures of the interesting puppet sequence, see director Lotfi Achour's Facebook page, particularly this album.  And there's still time to catch it in Newcastle (and respond to my discussion questions)

T. Rashid on London theatre's "Arab Turn"

"Once, Shakespeare’s Arabs were ciphers for his voice – like countless Middle Eastern politicians, those Arabs were puppets at an Englishman’s mercy. But at the World Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare himself became a cipher for Arab voices." Thus muses Tanjil Rashid at The White Review site - fortunately complicating the parallel structure as soon as he has proposed it.

Moving beyond Shakespeare, Tanjil asks what I take to be the main question (military overtones and all): "Why does British theatre now have its sights set on the Arab world?"  The answer is both obvious and fascinating, yielding an endless series of individual artists' and organizers' reasons, preoccupations, collaborations, stories. I take his grand conclusion to be overblown, but the prospect of less "crusty" cultural exchanges is always a nice one.

Oh and I'm looking forward to the podcast mentioned in the author note; it was fortuitous that Tanjil and I were able to meet up in Cairo last month, in the leafy garden of the Dutch Institute library no less, to record that.

If you're in London or Newcastle: Tunisian Macbeth

I was flirting with buying a last-minute plane ticket to go see the Tunisia-themed Macbeth adaptation, but looks like it won't happen. So I'd love to hear from friends and colleagues who are going to get to see it in London this weekend or Newcastle next weekend. Specifically, some things I'd love to know, besides general questions of scenography/performance/multimedia use/etc:

• how does the show reinforce/challenge the expectation of the folks in Stratford&London who commissioned it?  (I take these expectations to be: Shakespeare is Global, all you participating companies are local.)
• how does it corroborate or play with British preconceptions about the "Arab Spring"? Is it generally optimistic/pessimistic? How does it show the causes of the uprising?  the role of the West in it?
• how rich is the engagement with Shakespeare? is it just a pretext (Laila=Lady M, something you see in media accounts all the time) or do the adapters work to find interesting equivalents for the witches, ghosts, orphans, other plot or character details?
• as a show partly funded by the Tunisian Ministry of Culture, i.e. by an Islamist-leaning government its directors don't very much like, how does it address the question of transition - is there a Macduff? - is there peace and closure at the end? or darkness and censorship? or...?
• what kind of language games are played? Is there significance to any code-switching between fuSHa and 3ammiyya, or integration of English or French?
• how is Tunisian culture portrayed or not portrayed?
• how does the show speak differently to different audiences, with their different levels/types of background knowledge and different interests (Shakespeare buffs, political junkies, expats, etc.)?  Is it possible to get a range of reactions from non-Arab Londoners, Arabs in London, Tunisians in London, eventually (if it ever tours there) Tunisians back home?  Who laughs at which jokes?
• how are documentary sources (e.g., news footage?) integrated into the play? What's their function?

I will happily credit and post here as guest articles any responses I receive by email or as comments to the blog.  Thanks much!

"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.

"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.

Bra tops in the London chill (Cymbeline)

After mentioning the requisite linguistic issues, this very supportive review by Yeganeh Torbati quotes co-director Derik Uya Alfred on a different aspect of cultural exchange:

While Juba reaches springtime temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, an unseasonable London chill had audience members sitting in the open-air theatre wrapped in coats, scarves, and blankets.
Actors ran around on stage barefoot, the women often wearing skirts and bra tops, never betraying even a shiver.
"It was a very big challenge, that weather," Alfred said. "If you change the costume, if you put something under it you will be destroying the culture. We told them, 'Don't feel the cold. Just feel warm and send that warmth to the people in the auditorium and they will also feel that warmth."

 To counteract the depersonalizing connotations of the phrase "ran around on stage," you can get to know the company here.

I did find it striking how certain things were intentionally NOT localized to South Sudan (the knighting ceremony for Belarius & sons: "I dub thee" etc.) but the costumes were.  In many cases they seemed designed not to convey character (except for the khaki-shorts imperial police uniform) but to showcase local traditions: not only the bras & beads but things like the doctor/soothsayer's animal headdress. The production synopsis promises:

Costume that distinguishes between north and south Sudanese gestures at the history of empire and the struggle for nationhood on equal terms.

It quotes Alfred again:

We have brought in and bought a lot of costumes from different tribes that we have to celebrate the cultural diversity of southern Sudan. People in London are going to see something very different.

Some Arabic press on Ashtar's Richard II

Look at this wonderful review from The Guardian's Lyn Gardner. So I can only hope the play will come soon to a theatre near you. See it in Oxford tonight if you can.  (The Oxford site also has a Flickr slideshow.)

The play is good anywhere. It has clearly found an admiring niche here in Britain. But the primary (though not the only) audiences for Ashtar's Richard II, I would argue, are Palestinian and Arab audiences.  So what did the Arab papers think of it?  The Jericho reviews were very strong, but in London most couldn't get past the symbolism of it coming to London.


A richly informative report on the earlier show in Jericho is reprinted in the Iraq-based online cultural magazine Alefyaa. The reviewer quotes from Ghassan Zaqtan's very gracious translator's note, as well as from the program note:

وجاء في كتيب وزع قبل العرض ليل الاربعاء “ريتشارد الثاني احدى مسرحيات شكسبير التي تدور احداثها حول السلطة والسياسة وتملؤها الدسائس والخيانات كتبها شكسبير عام 1595 وتدور احداثها حول سقوط عائلة مالكة بريطانية وظهور عائلة مالكة جديدة بمساعدة لوردات البلاط… حكاية مثيرة تظهر لنا ما معنى ان يكون المرء ملكا وكيف تفسد القوة المطلقة صاحبها في نهاية الامر.

According to the flyer handed out Wednesday night before the show: "Richard II is one of the Shakespeare plays whose action turns on power and politics; it is filled with plots and betrayals. Written in 1595, it revolves around the fall of a British ruling family and the rise of a new ruling family with the help of the lords of the royal court... an interesting story that reveals to us what it means for a person to be a king, and how absolute power ultimately corrupts its holder.

The report also quotes interviews with several actors, including Jordan-based Sami al-Mutawasi, who came from Jordan to star as Richard. Al-Mutawasi notes the cast members' broad international experience and draws connections from the play's plot to recent political events not only in the west but, to his surprise, in the Arab world:

واضاف “كل عمل مسرحي يوجد فيه رسالة سياسية قوية… والاحداث السياسية تتشابه عند الشعوب. وكما ان هذه المسرحية تشبة اشياء كثيرة في الغرب صادفت ان تشابه اشياء كثيرة تحدث الان معنا وهي مراة لواقعنا.”

Writing the only real review I found so far, on the BBC Arabic site, Anwar Hamid praises the show's "splendid" performances, noting the cast's "confident" movement on stage and the rapt enthusiasm of even non-Arabic-speaking groundlings. All he finds to take issue with (and this is a fairly typical cultural fetish) are some cast members' pronunciation errors in classical Arabic: "because language, gramatically and phonetically, is the most important element of theatrical performance": 

مأخذي الوحيد كان على تكرر الأخطاء النحوية على لسان ممثلين رئيسيين، وهو شيء مؤسف، فاللغة، نحويا وصوتيا (فونيتيكيا)، هي أهم أركان الأداء المسرحي. حتى يكون الأداء مؤثرا يجب أن تكون المعارف النحوية للمثلين المسرحيين على مستوى عال، وكذلك يجب أن يكونوا متمكنين من مهارات النطق الأساسية: المخارج الواضحة للحروف والتلون الدرامي للصوت.

More PRE-view coverage is here (Shorouk), here (reprint of a BBC piece in which several actors are interviewed, invoking the cultural arrival marked by playing Shakespeare in fuSHa, and director Connall Morrison is interviewed, invoking the Arab Spring), here (Al-Youm 7), here (Fatah - there's also one on WAFA), and here (reprinted from al-Jazeera.net, apparently more interested in the composition of the cast and the event of the festival, with Palestinian Ambassador to London Dr. Manuel Hassassian and the Palestinian charge d'affaires in attendance, than in the show itself).

Also in Shorouk, from the "Mommy how come they get to go and we don't" department, this plangent piece bemoans the "demoralizing Egyptian absence from the World Shakespeare Festival": "This absence ... notably contradicts the history of Egyptian cultural preoccupation with the works of Shakespeare..."  Ramses Awad's book is used for background on the commemoration of the tercentennial of Shakespeare's death in 1916:

واللافت أن هذا الغياب المسرحي المصري عن مهرجان شكسبير العالمي، يأتي وكأنه مضاد لتاريخ اهتمامات ثقافية مصرية بأعمال شكسبير حتى أن الجامعة المصرية احتفلت في عام 1916 بمرور 300 عام على وفاته بتظاهرة ثقافية بالغة التميز بمعايير ذلك الزمان.

 A sad al-Ahram preview makes the same point: at this "international cultural event," Egypt will not be represented, though Palestine and Iraq will. Al-Afaq and El-Gornal note it too.

Between Arabics (Cymbeline)

My friend Katie and I saw the South Sudanese Cymbeline at the Globe tonight.  More thoughts on the show later when I'm less jet-lagged, but I just wanted to start by saying something about the language.  Katie lived for six years in Palestine and also frequently uses Iraqi Arabic and other dialects in her work (for an awesome British nonprofit, Reprieve).  I'm proficient in Egyptian and have a working knowledge of Lebanese.  And I must tell you how little we both understood of the language of this show.  Had I not reread Cymbeline this afternoon, I might have understood even less.
There were many energizing aspects of the show, but I'm sure there was a big chunk of the audience for whom the physical fact of hearing this language spoken onstage -- and at a venerable theatre in London! -- was the most exciting thing. The actors took obvious pleasure in using the language. And at many points they spliced in English words or short phrases to connect with their audience or for comic effect (Cymbeline about the Queen, on hearing the report of her death: "Crazy woman!"), which further drew attention to the underlying fabric of the South Sudanese Arabic.
It made me curious. Aside from the classical-colloquial question: How different is South Sudanese from other Sudanese Arabic?  Is it like Serbian and Croatian, which used to be called Serbo-Croatian until, suddenly, they weren't?

To my very untrained ear, many of the most commonly used words sounded identical to Egyptian (kways, 3ashan kida) and many of the nouns including most of the abstract vocabulary comes from "modern standard" fuSHa Arabic (mushkila, sharaf, but also samm, da3wa, etc. etc).  But much of the rest was as opaque to me as Portuguese to a Spanish speaker.  And it seems this distance may be deliberately increased in the next few decades.
According to a fascinating recent article by Emmanuel Monychol, there is considerable debate in South Sudanese intellectual circles about the merits of learning "Africanized" vs. "Khartoum" Arabic. Not sure if people use Khartoum to mean fuSHa or North Sudanese colloquial. Joseph Abuk, who helped adapt Cymbeline for this production, is quoted as follows:

Joseph Abuk states that Shakespeare's Cymbeline is relevant to South Sudan. Joseph Abuk seems to be in support of an Africanized Arabic. During my short chat with him, he said that there are two types of Arabic language that people must always bear in mind. There is the classic Khartoum Arabic, spoken by Khartoum and the local or Juba Arabic, which is lacking in classic Arabic [lexemes]. According to Joseph Abuk, lack of Arabic [lexemes] in Southern Arabic was due to the "Closed District Ordinances" which barred Northerners from travelling South and Southerners travelling north. It was a policy made by the British and Egypt in the 1930s.

Other aspects of the production - the costumes and dancing - certainly appeared to take the Africanizing, not Arabizing, route.  More on these later.  Photos coming, too.
Meanwhile, more comments from Abuk on the translation in this preview in the Independent.  Tons more media coverage here.  There's of course a whole shelf of books on Shakespeare in Africa; start here.

Interview with Ashtar director on "Palestinian" Richard II

Thanks to Marvin Carlson for pointing out this intelligent interview with Iman Aoun, artistic director of the Ashtar theatre group in Palestine, done by Sarah Irving at Electronic Intifada. The conversation gets into issues of language (classical vs. colloquial), interpretation, local reception, and normalization vs. BDS.  Here's one interesting exchange:

SI: Some of the other Shakespeare plays being performed in Arabic during Globe 2 Globe — such as an Iraqi version of Romeo and Juliet set in Baghdad — are very obviously trying to take Shakespeare’s drama and find specific Arab settings for it. Is this what Ashtar has tried to do with Richard II? Or have you left it more to audience to see for itself the modern message that the play might have?


IA: I think we have attempted to do the second. We have tried to be very faithful to the story and to the text itself. We did not add to it, we did not change it. We tried to put it in a modern setting in terms of the costume and flavor, very subtly, you cannot really see one place in our performance, but you could sense, if you want, many places. It is anywhere there is political turmoil, the greed of power. Yes, at some point you could see a Palestinian dress onstage, or you could see people dressed in Middle Eastern outfits, but it does not particularly say that this is happening here in Palestine or in a particular Arab city. We want the audience to concentrate and think.

"Fidelity" discourse aside (and we can easily see that as the counterswing of a certain pendulum), it sounds really worth seeing. One of the peculiarities of the Globe festival is that companies are asked to create these plays essentially on speculation -- for just a few UK performances and maybe one or two back home -- and then hope someone picks it up.  It would be so great if this play, since it appears to be really good and not just ethnographically curious, could tour to the US somewhere. Are you listening, Chicago?

Ashtar's Richard II resonates in Jericho

Thanks to Daniele Ranieri for sending me Reuters' excellent writeup on the reception of the Ashtar troupe's Richard II production in Jericho (playing there before coming to London's Globe-to-Globe fest):

"Are you contented to resign the crown?" the rebelling Lord Bolingbroke, leaning impatiently on the already usurped throne, asks the King.

"Yes, no. No, yes," Richard stutters, igniting a roar of laughter from the local audience too familiar with similar jibes aimed at Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh in their waning days.

"Was this the face that, like the sun, used to make those who looked upon it blink?" the king then blubbers into a mirror, echoing the ranting self-praise of Libya's Muammar Gadaffi before revolt, as it did with the title character, led to his murder last year.

 TIMELESS, UNIVERSAL

Organisers said the Palestinian company's production was not about the Arab Spring per se and worked in themes, though manifest in the current uprisings, not bound by time or borders.
"We were amazed how deeply the play delves into the psychology of people and this moment in history," said actress and producer Iman Aoun.
"It's as if people and politicians don't learn. They keep repeating their behavior and it makes us realise how much the play resembles the present," she said.

More reports here (Ma'an) and here (WAFA).

Happy Shakespeare Day, everyone!

"Leila and Ben" (timely Tunisian Macbeth)

The National previews Lotfi Achour's Tunisian-themed Macbeth adaptation, premiering in London this July and playing Tunis in September.

South Sudan Cymbeline

I was amazed last fall when a theatre person contacted me looking for an Arabic translation of Cymbeline for the purpose of translating it on into Juba Arabic for a production by the South Sudan Theatre Company.  Now it's really happening! 
England-based folks: join me at the show on May 3, and meanwhile check out the publicity and fundraising efforts of the London-based support staff, most recently here. Trailers and company info are here: http://www.southsudantheatre.com/.  And here's a BBC World Service report: just the sort of story the BBC would be attracted to.
A blog post by British Council director and "friend of the project" Tony Calderbank (is this the same Calderbank whose luminous translations of Arabic novels I've so enjoyed teaching?) writes movingly of the South Sudanese cast's determination to "stand for an hour or two on the world stage." Something not to be forgotten as various critics (including, no doubt, me) write various snarky things about the Globe-to-Globe and RSC festivals' framing and presentation of hot-spot Arab Shakespeares for their own self-serving rhetorical purposes.

A Tunisian-themed Macbeth

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.

Monadhil Daood to produce Romeo and Juliet in London 2012

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?"