Muslim Hamlet, II

I was flipping through the Voice on the train the other day and found an article about Sulayman Al-Bassam, a director staging a Muslim Richard III at BAM this summer. (Called "Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.")

Prior to Richard III, Al-Bassam re-envisioned Hamlet as "Al-Hamlet Summit." It won awards at both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival & the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre. Read an interview with Al-Bassam about Al-Hamlet Summit here.

The names of each act in Al-Hamlet Summit are those of the five daily prayers in Islam. Ophelia is re-imagined as a suicide bomber.

From one of the reviews: "The moral conundrum posed by the ghost in Shakespeare (is he to be believed, and what is his provenance?) finds its ingenious equivalent in the People's Liberation Front, which claims that the old king was murdered by his successor. Instead of a visitor from beyond the grave, this Hamlet (the handsome, intense Mohammed Kefah Al-Kous) is waylaid by a suited Western arms-dealer, who, in the fashion of such folk, is quite promiscuous about whom he's prepared to deal with."

Al-Bassam has directed/written other Hamlet variations as well: "Hamlet in Kuwait" and "Arab League Hamlet," all through his London-based theater company, Zaoum. Three Hamlets. So fascinating.

From his notes about Al-Hamlet Summit:

"Hamlet as an expression of politics…

This has been the driving force behind this work as it moved through its various stages of development that began in January 2001. The following text is a cross-cultural piece of writing in which I have tried to capture a sense of geographical context and contemporary resonance.

As performed by my London-based theatre company, Zaoum Theatre, it aims to allow English-speaking audiences a richer understanding of the Arab world and its people, and how their fates are inextricably linked to that of the West's.

I have endeavoured to avoid the polemic; favouring a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint.

The style of writing combines aspects of the Arab oral poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics.

In directing the piece, I sought to bring out a precise and grotesque hyperrealism in the work. The conference chamber that gradually slides into a war room directly illuminates the political setting of the piece. It is a huis-clos that parodies the so-called 'transparency' of today's political processes and it is a deadly arena of internal conflict.

It is not a piece about any specific country in the Arab world.

Rather, it presents a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond…"

From his notes about Arab League Hamlet:

"I will try to describe briefly the concerns which I myself was trying to address in the shaping of the piece:

We are living in an age of political charades, where the emphasis on 'spin', public opinion focus groups and the so-called transparency of government hides a callous agenda of economic and political barbarism. In the recent scramble to unite world opinion behind 'America's War on Terrorism', the slogan mentality that pitches good against evil, crusade against jihad presents us with a world split into two halves each baying for the other's blood.

The politicians that surround us are actors, grotesque frontmen for corporate interests and venal puppets of sham democracies.

This Hamlet is about these things, but also about a world where televised diplomacy reigns supreme, where the terrible paralysis of political discourse reaches epileptic heights, from which it is impossible to conceive what damage is being done to human beings on the ground.

Inside the Kingdom of Denmark, the delegates are consumed by vanity, overwhelmed by their own sense of self-importance, insouciant of the dangers threatening them from outside their borders and concerned uniquely with in creasing their stockpile of armaments to defend themselves against each other."