Qaddafi as Macbeth one last time

Robert Worth in the NYT:

That is what made the Libyan revolt such a riveting spectacle: unlike the other embattled Arab Spring dictators, Qaddafi showed no doubt, no instinct for compromise and self-preservation. He never really tried to stave off the end with half-hearted “reforms.” He seemed to know he was plunging himself and Libya down a tragic path, and, like Macbeth, to embrace it. Perhaps he understood that he had gone “so far in blood” that there was no turning back. In retrospect, his whole 42-year reign seemed to follow an inexorable arc toward ruin. From the handsome young revolutionary who inspired such hope in his people he transformed into the drugged, puffy-faced madman howling for slaughter in the streets of his own cities. Many Libyans told me they believed Qaddafi used black magic to keep himself in power for so long. I was almost tempted to believe it. I found Chadian witchcraft amulets in some of the weapons depots abandoned by his loyalists. Before his death, he behaved like someone who had sold his soul to the devil, and, like Faust, was waiting to be dragged down to Hell.

Video of our conversation at BU

BU's media services people used a new program called Echo 360 to capture the conversation in Boston last Wednesday between Sulayman Al-Bassam, Graham Holderness, and me.  Watch it here: : http://echo360.bu.edu:8081/ess/echo/presentation/7a568a3f-fce4-45ba-b2a1-9c119488e55e
Apologies for the weird focus on the video - I think everyone is still getting the hang of the new technology.

Preview - Speaker's Progress in Boston

"How do you make a play about an abstract idea like change?"  Sulayman Al-Bassam speaks to the Boston Globe.

Judging by the dress rehearsal I saw last night, there are still some technical things to be ironed out before tonight's opening (never mind the idea of change - the real issue is that these guys are scrambling for provisional closure, editing to the last minute!), some meanings to be nailed down, but the play has an amazing energy.

Boston people: come see the show and any of the myriad post-show or para-show events at ArtsEmerson! Reminder: you can also see Sulayman and me in discussion with Graham Holderness at BU this afternoon, 12-2.

Coverage of Al-Bassam's Speaker's Progress in New York

Very favorable New York Times review of the New York performance of The Speaker's Progress at BAM last week; Al-Bassam's own "wonderfully dry performance" gets special praise.  In Richard III he played an implausibly slick and charming U.S. Ambassador (later edited out to make room for Mister Richmond in the US performances); now he has switched sides, playing an Arab director and performing in Arabic (at least in the draft of the script I saw). 

 A brief write-up an audio interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS' NewsHour, who also did a long segment on Al-Bassam when his Richard III: An Arab Tragedy played Washington and New York in 2009.  The first segment's headline had Al-Bassam "take inspiration" from Shakespeare; the current one has him "taking inspiration" from the Arab Spring.  And there is something to this: it does seem that the source text Twelfth Night plays a relatively insignificant role in the logic of Al-Bassam's new play -- it could have been any other play, or even another type of iconic performance.  Whereas his Hamlet was really a Hamlet.  This is not a criticism.

These things are being posted on SABAB Theatre's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/groups/sababtheatre/

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

Arabic review of "Tempest" in Aida Camp...

...in Al-Bayan, online here.

Shakespeare on Palestine on Fox News

Here's a totally unreadable piece on the Fox News web site by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center published in the runup to Mahmoud Abbas' speech at the United Nations.  Cooper recycles all the old cliches - "backed by Iran," "they teach their children to hate," etc. As though it were a matter of Palestinians recognizing Israelis' rights! Of course no such screed would be complete without an appeal to Shakespeare (the only universally agreed-upon scripture we've got on this planet) to buttress the opinionator's authority.  In this case, he invokes both Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

In Shakespeare’s words, “The fault lies not in our stars, but ourselves.” The Palestinians might as well be relying on astrology rather than looking in their cracked national mirror.

Despite their attempted charade at “unity” by Fatah and the Hamas a few months ago, the Palestinians (like Hamlet) are fatally unable to make up their minds. There are two Palestinian presidents, two prime ministers, and a legislature that neither meets nor passes laws.

As it happens, the context is interesting. Julius Caesar and Hamlet were written one after the other, and what is striking (as I learned from David Bromwich in his excellent Yale seminar on "Political Shakespeare") is the similarity between the two plays. The sulky insurgents Brutus and Hamlet, at varying speeds, both "make up their minds" to - hello, Rabbi Cooper! - take up arms against a corrupt, unaccountable, increasingly arrogant autocrat.  Here's the speech spoken by Cassius in Julius Caesar 1.2:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Both plays, alas, end with the death of the hero and various other corpses littering the stage as well.  So I'm not endorsing that approach. I just want to point out that the general intellectual laziness of rote-Zionist discourse extends to its sloppy citation of Shakespeare.