Palestinian-themed Merchant of Venice in the Netherlands (scholarly article)

An article by Jessica Apolloni in this month's Shakespeare Bulletin examines a Moroccan-Dutch author's Palestine-themed Merchant of Venice adaptation. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Shylock Meets Palestine:Rethinking Shakespeare in Abdelkader Benali’s Yasser

University of Minnesota

Abdelkader Benali’s Yasser (2001), a recent adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, expands and complicates the cross-cultural tensions in Shakespeare’s play. Yasser is a monologue centering on the character Yasser Mansour, a Palestinian actor thinking through what it means to play the role of Shylock after growing up near the Israeli-Palestinian border in the 1980’s Intifada. While Yasser contemplates the idea of playing a Jewish character, he struggles to identify with Shylock as a member of the ethnic group that currently opposes Palestine. Benali examines questions of stolen, ascribed, and confused identity through Yasser’s plight to understand Shylock. In this process, the “fiction” of Shakespeare’s text permeates Yasser’s reality. Yasser claims his English girlfriend, who plays Portia, “forces him into Christianity,” and becomes his antagonist both on and off the stage; the pound of flesh becomes symbolic of the blood spilt in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and Yasser’s adult life in the West increasingly reflects a sense of Shylock’s persecution (Benali 12).¹ Through Yasser’s reflections, Benali illuminates the fluid boundary between text, performer, and audience.
Situated within the growing interest in Shakespeare and the Arab world [how happy does that make me? -ML], Yasser adds a new layer to the continued process of understanding, adapting, and portraying Shakespeare.² Benali uses the cultural baggage inherent in staging The Merchant of Venice to think through literature’s role in revealing violent tensions and also at times contributing to cultural conflict. In this process, Benali rethinks what it can mean to perform Shakespeare today. As the play progresses, Yasser Mansour finds a way to make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by connecting imaginatively with Shakespeare’s creation of an earlier social system that situates Jews and Christians on opposing sides. In the porous relationship between [End Page 213] fiction and reality that is developed in Yasser, we see the means of establishing prejudice in literary works as well as their potential for creating common understanding. Benali places the violent cultural conflict of The Merchant of Venice center-stage, continually exposing the play’s problematic performance history in order to establish a dialogue with his audience. The cultural weight of Shakespearean performance becomes a ‘cultural touchstone’ for Benali’s discussion of the current Middle East conflict (or page ref if quotation). In Benali’s rethinking of Shakespeare, Yasser gets to the heart of cross-cultural conflict by looking at questions of identity and exploring literature’s power to create a common means of communication.

What it all seems to come down to, sadly, is that Palestinians are the new Jews. Here's her conclusion:

Yasser can then confidently state, “The Arab understands Shylock better than anyone!” (3). Through his persecution as a Palestinian, Yasser can empathize with Shylock’s plight in The Merchant of Venice. Although throughout the play we get a glimpse of what it would be like to grow up in the Intifada, a time of intense violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Yasser realizes that despite their constructed differences, there is no one better to play the role of Shylock than himself. Both Yasser and Shylock live in societies where they have indefinite legal and social existences, their communities enclosed within high-rising walls (Falke 230). The sixteenth-century indeterminate status of Jews in Europe parallels the current ambiguous status of Palestinians, with both identities lacking solidarity in sovereign, legal, and social statuses (Shapiro 175; Falke 233). Benali equates the violent cultural tensions occurring in Shakespeare’s text with current cultural conflict. Through the power of role-playing, Benali highlights the innate similarities between two perceivably opposing identities in Yasser and Shylock.
While Yasser realizes that no one is better suited to play Shylock than himself, the terrible prejudice he has faced in Western society is what creates this bond. Yasser and Shylock have come to an accord that is merely based on a mutual sense of violence, oppression, and injustice. Yasser’s journey leads us through questions of identity, the politics of staging Shakespeare, the impact of role-playing, and the horrific implications of cultural misunderstanding. Benali evokes Western perceptions and prejudices through the lens of Shakespeare in order to articulate an individual voice pleading for mutual respect. The last lines of the play illustrate a hopeless dream of Yasser’s, in which Lucy will move to Palestine with him so that she can see the place where he was born. Here, she will learn his language and finally stop seeing the difference between a Christian and a Muslim (42). Yet we know from what we have previously seen in the play that this is an impossible dream. Lucy not only ignores Yasser’s concerns over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but she also blatantly refuses [End Page 228] to understand Yasser’s culture. In the same way Portia refutes Shylock, Lucy suppresses Yasser’s challenging of current social structures. It appears nothing can overcome their antagonism, both on and off the stage. In Yasser’s final unattainable dreams, the play echoes the same sense of unease felt in the resolution to The Merchant of Venice, where the fantasy of a happy ending illustrates the long road still ahead in reaching mutual understanding.

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

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).