Margaret Litvin

Review of The Speaker's Progress (directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam), Paramount Theatre, Boston, USA, October 12-16, 2011

Al-Bassam’s two previous Shakespeare engagements were scene-for-scene quasilocalized adaptations of Hamlet and Richard III respectively Unlike them, The Speaker’s Progress (TSP) took a double grip on its Shakespearean intertext. In TSP, a former director is sent abroad with a troupe of ‘‘envoys’’ to defend their unnamed totalitarian homeland, which has banned all theatre. The ‘‘text’’ they reconstruct for the western audience, and thus the play-within-a-play, is a Gulf Arab localized version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Black-and-white film fragments of the supposed 1963 production actually written, cast, and directed by Al-Bassam in playful faux-1960s style provide the pretext and counterpoint for the modern-day outer plot. This metatheatrical move follows a venerable Arab tradition of Shakespearean mise-en-abime, especially beloved by 1970s filmmakers and 1980s playwright-directors. (Full video of the Speaker’s Progress is available on the Global Shakespeares open-access archive (Huang and Donaldson).) In the outer play, life gradually becomes art. Despite (or because) of the Ministry of Information camera downstage, the sterile rubber-gloved reconstruction sparks a revolutionary performance; the Speaker, like Hamlet in The Mousetrap, adds a few subversive lines; the ‘‘envoys’’ blossom into actors and then (so the hastily reengineered ending would have the audience believe) into full-fledged moral and political agents. The Malvolio character (Fayez Kazak), a sinister aparatchik in the outer play cast as a hardline Mullah in the inner play, is gulled, whipped, and imprisoned in a wire cage. The outer plot responded to fast-shifting politics (Al-Bassam ‘‘Director’s Note’’). Al-Bassam’s early draft, written in 2010 just a month before a Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation ignited what was later labeled ‘‘the Arab Spring,’’ ended with selfindulgent pessimism: the female re-enactors ran home for curfew; the Director, crossdressed to substitute for them, was attacked by armed vigilantes seeking to punish the forbidden same-sex love between the Viola and Olivia figures (Al-Bassam script).

Egypt’s Uzbek Mirror: Muḥammad al-Mansī Qandīl’s Post-Soviet Islamic Humanism

[AbstractThis article interrogates the post-Soviet Central Asian setting of Egyptian writer Muammad Mansī Qandīl’s novel Qamar alā Samarqand (2004). Unusually for an Arabic literary work set in the post-Soviet space, Qamar expresses no nostalgia for Communist ideals. Instead it uses Uzbekistan as a double mirror for Nasser- and Sadat-era Egypt, grimly exposing life under authoritarian rule and also, more remarkably, conjuring an alternative humanist utopia based not in socialism but in the mythopoetic and spiritual resources of the classical Islamic tradition. Heavily expurgated at first and later republished in full, Qamar illustrates the richness of the Arab-Soviet cultural nexus and the continuing provocativeness of the literary works it has inspired., Abstract This article interrogates the post-Soviet Central Asian setting of Egyptian writer Muḥammad Mansī Qandīl’s novel Qamar ʿalā Samarqand (2004). Unusually for an Arabic literary work set in the post-Soviet space, Qamar expresses no nostalgia for Communist ideals. Instead it uses Uzbekistan as a double mirror for Nasser- and Sadat-era Egypt, grimly exposing life under authoritarian rule and also, more remarkably, conjuring an alternative humanist utopia based not in socialism but in the mythopoetic and spiritual resources of the classical Islamic tradition. Heavily expurgated at first and later republished in full, Qamar illustrates the richness of the Arab-Soviet cultural nexus and the continuing provocativeness of the literary works it has inspired.]

Full of noises: when “World Shakespeare” met the “Arab Spring”

In summer 2012, to coincide with the Olympic Games, the United Kingdom celebrated a summer of Shakespeare. Troupes from around the world were invited to produce their own versions of plays from the playwrights corpus. 2012 was also a very eventful year, politically, in the Arab world, as people reacted to what had been dubbed the “Arab Spring”. This article looks at three plays produced by Arabic companies for the World Shakespeare Festival: the Palestinian Ashtar Theatres Richard II, the Iraqi Theatre Companys Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, and the Tunisian Artistes Producteurs Associés’ Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History. Using these performances, this article examines how different Arabic theatre troupes negotiate expectations of different audiences as well as their own artistic aims using the “playable surface” of Shakespeares plays.

Arab Near East

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a deep presence in the theatre tradition and political discourse of the Arab Near East. He turns up more frequently than any other Shakespearean character, and probably more generally than any other literary character of European origin. Since his arrival on the Arab stage at the turn of the 20th century, Hamlet has been presented as an operetta hero, a heroic fighter for justice, and more recently a bumbling would-be dissident. Meanwhile, his famous question — »To be or not to be?« — has been appropriated as a slogan by nationalist politicians, Islamist preachers, and others seeking to underscore the existential urgency of various causes across the political spectrum.