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."

Muslim Hamlet

This is the CD cover of a Hamlet soundtrack--Bosnian director Haris Pašović's version of Hamlet, music performed by East West Orchestra. The music is "oriental/ambiental, improvisations based on classic Turkish themes."

Song number 3 is: "She's Conjunctive To My Life." (Sounds like a John Mayer title, if he wrote in Elizabethan.)

Claudius speaking about Gertrude (IV.vii.14-17):

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.

Pašović's Hamlet is situated in a Turkish court instead of Danish. See a CNN World clip about this production here. From an interview with Pašović, on why he set it where he set it:

"It is a story about power, about rebellion, about human essence in all its greatness and all its irrelevance. Since this play is so universal that every epoch has its own Hamlet, I decided to refer to an empire that was a super-power during a certain period of history – the Ottoman Empire. It became interesting to me to view the whole story from the perspective of a powerful empire that encompassed several dozens of different peoples, cultural identities, and from the perspective of the Muslim world."

He continues:

"It may sound paradoxical, but I think that if he were to write Hamlet today, Shakespeare would set it in the Ottoman court . . . The structure of the Ottoman state is absolutely Shakespearian. That is something about which Shakespeare wrote in all his plays. I did not change the story, I have not changed anything in the story, I did not change the names, I only changed the titles; instead of king and queen, we use sultan and Valide-sultan, and where in the original there is a Christian religious reference, we have translated it into Islamic references."