All the world is RSC's stage

More promo for the World Shakespeare Festival, now hyped as "the biggest Shakespeare festival ever" in this a Guardian interview with the ever-articulate Deborah Shaw. There's also some background on the Iraqi show.

Excited to go to London and Stratford in a couple of weeks to take in a few of these shows.  Only wish I had time to swing by Glasgow - looks like they are doing amazing, really thoughtful things on Arab-world topics at the National Theatre of Scotland!  

"Hamlet" Abu Ismail

Hamlet headlines a post on the influential Arabist blog about wacko Egyptian presidential candidate Hazem Abu Ismail's "Mama Amreeka" scandal.
(Meanwhile, photos circulating on Facebook show Abu Ismail as a quasi-Egyptian "god of lies."

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.

"5) Do you agree that Hamlet can be a typical Palestinian guy? How?"

An obviously talented and dedicated university English teacher in Gaza, Refaat Alareer, posted this question last month as one of 12 Shakespeare questions for his students to answer on their class blog.  You can read all the questions and their responses here.  Here is the personal blog of the teacher; he's also on Twitter at @ThisisGazaVoice. And here is my favorite of his students' answers:

Can Hamlet be a typical Palestinian guy? Why?
Yes, he can.
Hamlet and an ordinary Palestinian guy have some things in common but also differ in other things. First, they resemble each other in the fact that, metaphorically speaking, the mother is presented as Palestine, Hamlet senior as a dead father and the uncle "Claudius" as Israel. The ghost of Hamlet tells Hamlet junior that "Claudius" killed him to marry his mother and take over the kingdom. This is found in act 1 scene 5 "The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
    Now wears his crown."
 Consequently, the feeling of revenge as a result of the death of the father reveals for Palestinian guy the facts that Israel came to take over Palestine to enjoy its great riches and resources and make it their own. Thus, both Hamlet and the Palestinian desire to avenge the deaths of their fathers. However, they differ in two things. First, why the two couldn't at the beginning avenge for the deaths of their fathers. Second, Hamlet managed to take revenge at the end. On the other hand, the Palestinian guy either died trying or still can't. For further explanation, Hamlet couldn't kill or delayed killing his uncle 'till later on for several reasons. First of all some say that these lines of Hamlet in act 3 scene 3"Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying, and now I'll do't. And so goes to heaven, and am I re[ven]ged. That would be scanned. A villain kills my father, and for that, I his sole son do this same villain send to Heaven." Prove that he was a religious man. So how can he kill the king? The God's spokesman on earth. Second, he wasn't very sure that his father was the ghost and what he had told him was true. Finally, some say that Hamlet didn't want to hurt his mother. First his father dies and now her new husband. His love for her is found in act 3 scene 2 "I will speak daggers to her but use non." The Palestinian couldn't avenge his father's death not because Israel is Allah's representative on earth, or because he is not sure that Israel was the reason behind the death of his father nor is it because he didn't want to hurt "Palestine" his mother. But because he simply doesn't have the means to and if he could at this moment to get out there and avenge the death of his father he would do it without any delay or hesitation. The second thing they don't have in common is that Hamlet at the end of the play manages to kill his father's killer. Unlike the Palestinian guy who is still trying, hoping and wishing. So again yes Hamlet, in a way, can be a typical Palestinian guy.

Other students give a more politically universalizable youth-centered reading:

Of course, any Palestinian at one day of his life will face the same as Hamlet.
What Hamlet faced is called The identity crises .Your parents want you to be something you don’t want ,or against your future plans and the only thing is available to you is to follow them. Father wants you to be a doctor and your intelligence is linguistic you want to be a writer .To sum up you will do something for your father as Hamlet did.

As with teaching everywhere, it's humbling to see what students get from the assignment, what they don't get, what they appropriate as their own and what passes them by.  Of course there are local constraints too.  The student who wrote the long response above also posted: "But plz stop increasing the number of questions !! 3 weeks won't be enough to answer them all !! First, no electricity. Second, no enough hours in the day !"

A Saudi Serial: "To Be Or Not?"

This seems to have no relation with Shakespeare except the title. But doesn't the Gulfi Colloquial sound cool? http://online.mjroh.com/517.html

"War after war! Where are all our men?"

Check out RSC Associate Director Deborah Shaw's eloquent piece on Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, the play created by her husband Monadhil Daood for the RSC's upcoming World Shakespeare Festival.
I'm looking forward to seeing it in May.  Here is Shaw's argument about intercultural appropriation:

At home I am often asked about the foreign-language productions that will be performed during the festival. A common question is: “How do they cope with Shakespeare’s complex language?” I wonder if there is an expectation inherent in the question that they will produce beautiful, literary translations, which will stay as close as possible to the original text. Do we expect them to perform close approximations of British productions, but in foreign clothes? Because they won’t.
Serious artists encounter Shakespeare as a playwright, his work to be transplanted and made sense of through the prism of a different reality and set of culture references. They tell the Shakespeare story they are compelled to tell, appropriating characters, narrative, moral dilemmas, symbolism and themes in a way that, I would argue, embodies the true dramatic spirit of Shakespeare.

What she describes is still a one-to-one encounter (which is what an RSC commission might tend to produce) rather than what I've been calling a national or regional "Shakespeare tradition."  But I find this an attractive and convincing statement of how any "serious artist" (including an Anglophone one) would approach the task of adapting or even producing Shakespeare.

The Grammar of "Being"

From an article in the Dartmouth campus paper describing a fun recent event on campus:

Profs. reconsider Hamlet’s dilemma

That Hamlet’s famous dilemma of “to be or not to be” resists translation across languages is a result of linguistic, cultural and social differences, elements discussed by professors from the Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures department at Wednesday’s colloquium, “To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question: The Problematics of ‘Being’ in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese.”

The four languages represented in the lecture are characterized by contradicting conceptions of grammar, time, religion and philosophy that all diverge from those of English. The difficulty in translating the phrase lies not only in verbal conversion but also in fundamental differences between each culture’s conceptualization of life, according to the panelists.
Professors Kamal Abu-Deeb, Sarah Allan, James Dorsey and Lewis Glinert represented the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew departments, respectively.

Sounds like a great way to advertise a language department. (Though my favorite grammatical fact about Arabic in this context - that it has no infinitive form - was not mentioned.)