Loughrey in Dubai

This from the MENA Financial News, not known for the subtlety of their reporting. If there is any distinction between "wrote for," "influenced," and "is key for understanding," it utterly eludes them. But isn't it nice to be able to claim kinship with Shakespeare, or even to be part of the "human" he invented? Especially if it will help advance the economy.

Shakespeare key to understanding the Gulf region, says expert

Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare is a major influence on the Arab World, a leading academic will demonstrate in a public lecture.

Professor Bryan Loughery, a special guest of The British University in Dubai, will be discussing 'Arabesque: Shakespeare in Arabia'. Loughery has set himself the ambitious task of explaining how a country boy from Stratford-Upon-Avon authored works for the entire world, including the United Arab Emirates.'It's a tale of trade, empire and globalization, linking the Yemen, the Great Mughal, Arabic versions of the Bard, and performances of Twelfth Night in Doha,' said Loughery.

'Shakespeare is unique in that his work appears to influence and rise above the needs of particular eras, cultures and languages', he added.

Dr. Loughery, Director of Oakleigh International management consultants, first proposed some of these ideas to the most recent World Shakespeare Congress. He is keen to discuss the Bard's relevance to the GCC region, bringing a novel and subtle theme to the development of a knowledge economy in the United Arab Emirates.

A bit more here.

My review of Al-Bassam's Richard

Almost a year later (who knows how the production has evolved by now?) my review of Sulayman Al-Bassam's Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is out in the Winter '07 Shakespeare Bulletin. Online through Project MUSE here: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v025/25.4litvin.html

And here are the nut grafs:

Included in the Complete Works Festival, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy was billed as a "response" to the main RSC production. It was an inspired commission. The Kuwaiti-British Al-Bassam oversaw a new Arabic translation of Shakespeare's text and assembled a gifted pan-Arab cast. He
worked with costume designer Abdulla Al Awadi to reproduce (and parody) a variety of regional fashions, dressing Queen Elizabeth (Carole Abboud) in Qatar-esque "sophisticated hijab" and punctuating Lady Anne (Nadine Joma'a) with a pink handbag in the shape of a poodle. He recruited Kuwaiti musicians to perform a powerful score that drew on a range of Gulf Arab musical styles, offset with eerie post-modern compositions by Lewis Gibson. And, as he had done in his earlier Shakespeare adaptation, The Al-Hamlet Summit (staged in English in 2002 and in Arabic since 2004), Al-Bassam sought out contemporary Arab and Muslim
correlatives for Shakespeare's treatment of rhetoric, religion, family, and politics.

However, Al-Bassam's take on Richard III went a step deeper than allegory. Tickets were originally sold under the title "Baghdad Richard," but Al-Bassam wisely decided against producing an adaptation centered on Saddam Hussein. Instead Richard III: An Arab Tragedy used Shakespeare's play to orient Western viewers to some traits of Gulf Arab culture and politics. It also commented (pessimistically, I thought) on the chances that such an orientation could somehow make sense of the violence and suffering in the region. In fact, by showing how the very tokens of cultural exchange (traditional costumes, music, prayers, food rituals, rhetorical tropes, etc.) were cynically theatricalized and exploited by those in power, the production undercut its own ethnographic lessons even as it imparted them.

Journal issue devoted to Arab Shakespeare

The current issue of Critical Survey brings together seven articles on Arab/ic adaptations, translations, and rewritings of Shakespeare's plays. Beginning of my editorial is reprinted below (the PDF is here); you can see the whole issue (but your library needs to subscribe to Berghann Journals) here. Hurray! Many thanks to Prof. Graham Holderness for making this possible.

To my knowledge, this is the first essay collection in any language to be devoted to Arab appropriations of Shakespeare. Studies of international Shakespeare appropriation have mushroomed over the past 15 to 20 years. Excitement began to build in the 1990s, as several lines of academic inquiry converged. Translation theorists found in Shakespeare’s plays a convenient (because widely known and prestigious) test case. Scholars in performance studies, having noted how sharply local context could influence a play’s staging and interpretation, saw a need to account for ‘intercultural’ performances of Shakespeare in various languages and locales. Marxist scholars became interested in the fetishization of Shakespeare as a British cultural icon
which, in turn, was used to confer cultural legitimacy on the project of capitalist empire-building. Scholars of postcolonial drama and literature explored how the periphery responded. The “new Europe” provided another compelling set of examples. All this scholarship has developed quickly and with a great sense of urgency. Shakespeareans in many countries have contributed. By now there is a rich bibliography on Shakespeare appropriation in India, China, Japan, South Africa, Israel, and many countries in Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe.
Until recently, scholars of Arabic literature and drama were mainly passive participants in this growing Shakespeare conversation. The Arab world went unnoticed in the numerous edited volumes on international Shakespeare reception and appropriation. Though often aware of the major congresses on the subject, Arab scholars were rarely represented there. The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online, which catalogues materials in 118 languages, has had only
one active Arabic-speaking contributor in the past decade. Interesting studies of Shakespeare reception written in Arabic have not been translated. In English, a handful of articles and dissertations has represented the field. When scholars in Europe and the United States have occasionally mentioned ‘Arab Shakespeare’ to their colleagues, they have presented it almost as a novelty. Sometimes they have not hesitated to draw easy laughs by invoking the old legend
or joke that Shakespeare was really a crypto-Arab, ‘Shaykh Zubayr’.
However, this situation is changing quickly. In 2006 and 2007 the World Shakespeare Congress and the Royal Shakespeare Company, respectively, welcomed contributions by Arab playwrights. Shakespeareans and scholars of Arab drama and literature are getting better at talking to each other. (I should note that Graham Holderness has personally done much to help this trend with his involvement and encouragement over the past two years.) And as the essays in this issue will attest, Shakespeareans and Arabists alike are taking a variety of approaches to the question of what Arab readers, translators, rewriters, producers, directors, critics, and audiences do with Shakespeare.

Articles by Mark Bayer, Sameh F. Hanna, Khalid Amine, Rafik Darragi, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, Holderness, and me.

Article on Arab Shakespeare from Libya

An article by Sondos Elgatit in the Tripoli Post (24/11/2007), titled, "Shakespeare in Arabia," reads Sulayman al-Bassam's version of Richard III against Khalid Amine's analysis of two plays by Abdelkrim Berrchid.
http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=4&i=1411

Classicism as experiment (Blood Horse)

Sonali Pahwa sent me her review of the Iraqi Macbeth, performed at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre this week. She makes the point that staging old-school classicized Shakespeare in today's Iraq is a pretty daring experiment in its own right. As my teacher Farouk Mustafa once put it: "art for art's sake, for life's sake." Thanks, Sonali!

On entering the Miami (formerly Fuad el-Mohandes) theatre to watch the Iraqi play Hussaan al-damm (Blood Horse), I thought it inevitable that the performance would draw a gathering of Iraqi expatriates. But I didn’t expect to see a large satin Iraqi flag hung at the entrance, signalling that this was no ordinary CIFET event. Inside the theatre, the air echoed with the distinctive ‘j’ and ‘ch’ sounds of Iraqi Arabic as groups of early arrivals waited for the show to begin. The crowd was considerably more elegant than your average intellectuals. Men in suits and women with fulsomely coiffed (and uncovered) hair comported themselves as if at an embassy party. Only the well-loved oudist Nasseer Shamma came in his customary t-shirt.
The Patriotic Troupe for Acting presented a much-abbreviated adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, seemingly a relevant text through which to comment on the power struggles of contemporary Iraq. It was done in classical fashion, however. The performance was composed of a series of monologues and dialogues, enacted in dramatic lighting, which relied quite straightforwardly on the power of the text. The actors playing the adumbrated cast of Macbeth, Banquo, Lady Macbeth and Macduff all delived their lines with a creditable command of fusha and with visible passion. Perhaps the lone experimental touch was the use of a video screen to stage Macduff’s version of the prophesy of Macbeth’s death. In much of the play, the conception was stagey and the monologues delivered in the textbook style taught at acting schools.
On the other hand, I felt that the insistent classicism of Blood Horse was intended to demonstrate that Iraq did still have theatre, according to cherished old norms that validated Shakespeare in fusha translation as a benchmark of high culture. Those of us who came looking for an experimental performance wanted to see the fragmentation of Iraq dissected on stage, but others in the mostly Iraqi audience cheered the grand Shakespearean performance, perhaps in memory of days when they could go to the theatre in their finery and watch tragedy in measured
cadences rather than the violence now seen on the streets and on television.
At the end of the half-hour performance, audience members who had been clicking away on their digital cameras gave a rousing ovation and rushed onstage to greet the troupe. Many had their pictures taken with the better-known actors and with Shamma. Reporters from the al-Iraqiyya television were among a handful of satellite television crews interviewing the director and cast. There were smiles and hugs all round. At this effusion of national feeling the non-Iraqi critic was something of an outsider. I left, but trust that a party followed and that a good, nostalgic time was had by all.

El Attar at CIFET

The Cairo festival also includes a show called F*** Darwin, Or How I learned to Love Socialism, by Egyptian playwright/director Ahmed El Attar. Unaffiliated with any state-funded theatre in Egypt, El Attar's Temple Independent Theatre Company is producing the show under the banner of Montenegro. It's actually a co-production with a Montenegrin group.

El Attar's postmodern collage, About Othello, Or Who's Afraid of William Shakespeare (co-written with Nevine El Ibiary) was produced in Geneva last November. Earlier (Sept 13-18, 2006) it played to mixed reviews at AUC's Falaki Theatre, the only venue in Cairo that could handle the technical complexities of its 2.5-ton industrial set and many projection screens.

According to El Attar, the whole of F*** Darwin involves a family sitting on a couch, very static, in contrast to the many moving parts of his Othello. When the father speaks to the son, it is with excerpts from Gamal Abdel Nasser speeches. Which is kind of nice.

UPDATE 6/23/11: The link to the About Othello review has gone dead, but I found another one, by Waleed Marzouk for the Daily News Egypt.  Clips of this visually not very interesting show soon to come at MIT's Global Shakespeares archive - stay tuned.

Iraqi Shakespeare at CIFET

This year's Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre will include an Iraqi adaptation of Macbeth.

It's called Blood Horse, presented by the National Acting Troupe (more details as I get them):

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is well known among intellectuals and those interested in theatre. However, we’ve presented here a new view of the play, modernizing the events and making them speak of the reality of our world. We deal here with absolute power, presenting it out of space and time, so we see Shakespeare’s personae out of their worlds, flying in spaces of unknown worlds, surrounded by smoke, fear, and darkness, in a tension that harmonizes with the thematic of the show.