Thanks, Alison,

You're right.  It's a fascinating article, its implications profound.

Judy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 10:24 PM
Subject: [POETRYETC] Shakespeare in Arabic


Fascinating article about Shakespeare in the Arab world as a force for
dissent, sounding very like the place he once held in the Polish world -

Best

A

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1575524,00.html

The bard of Basra

When fighting dictators and censorship, Arab directors have one playwright
they can fall back on: Shakespeare

Sulayman Al-Bassam
Thursday  September 22, 2005
The Guardian


The Al-Hamlet Summit ... never yet performed in Arabic within the Arab world


If you are an Arab theatre-maker looking to take a pop at authority in
today's Arab world, Shakespeare is your perfect bedmate, co-conspirator and
alibi. Hidden within everything that is sometimes construed as tame,
inoffensive and establishment about the Bard to the modern western
sensibility lies - to the Arab theatre practitioner - a heaving underworld
of illicit meanings, transgressive actions and contentious critique.

"Shaikh Al-Zubair" (Shayk-uzu-Beare), as the Bard is fondly referred to in
Arabic - Zubair being a small town east of Basra - is, to the radical Arab
theatre-maker, a walking toolkit of dissent. The thematic and formal overlap
between Shakespeare's world and today's Arab world is striking. Both are
turbulent, uneven worlds of Rulers and Ruled in which religious authority
and corrupt oligarchs reign supreme over a largely feudal and tribal social
fabric. Both are worlds in which the power of language, poetry and
storytelling are imbued with incantatory, transformative powers - in the
case of Arabic, this power has sacred roots, anchored as it is in the Holy
Qur'an. Wars, conspiracies, hooded assassins, criminal oppression, questions
of kingship, statehood, national and individual identity are all daily fare
in today's Arab world.

On a micro-political level, Shakespeare's plays converge with a host of
social and local issues at the forefront of Arab debate. Notions of marriage
(arranged versus free), parent-child relationships, ambiguities of sexuality
and gender, women's rights and the quest of the massive youth population for
freedom in love, expression, individuality - all of these are burning issues
of live debate in the Arab world. A fundamental pre-modernity is at the core
of both the Shakespearian world and today's Arab world, linking the two
along a palpable line of tension.

What we are witnessing in the Arab world today is the collision of this
pre-modern world whose value systems and perceptions have changed little
over centuries with the tide of massive historical change. Out of this
chaotic, sprawling and painful upheaval, whose harbinger is the
technological revolution, whose horseman is the rampant globalisation of
western culture and whose trumpet is the agonised roar of militant Islam -
out of this comes the stuff of drama.

But drama, along with other art forms, is a well-guarded mode of expression
in today's Arab world. The drying up of significant Arab dramatists' voices
in the past 20 years bears witness to this. The reasons behind this draining
of writers' voices are manifold and complex, but suffice to say that theatre
is one of the favourite dishes of the one-eyed cyclops that is the censor.

State censorship takes two main forms. The direct form is that of a
censorship committee that damns or approves texts, visits dress rehearsals,
cuts scenes or cancels plays. The second, indirect form is through the state
monopolisation of the theatrical means of production, which restricts and
controls resources as it pleases. These forms of censorship are the single
most potent indicator of the subversive power of theatre in the Arab world.
While street protests are easily put down, what happens in the darkness of
an auditorium is less controllable. Live performance is a threat, the
Theatre of Ideas is a threat: governments fear it.

On the opening night of my play The Al-Hamlet Summit in Cairo, I stood on
the inside of the glass foyer as more than 400 spectators - frustrated by
the lack of tickets for a performance that was billed as a political
bombshell and, after the arrival of 20 foreign VIPs, enflamed by a rumour
that the theatre was admitting only foreigners - rioted outside the theatre.
The police were called, the doors nearly collapsed and five people were
arrested. The play was performed again at midnight to allay the
disappointment of those who had not got in. It is worth noting that the only
reason The Al-Hamlet Summit got permission to perform in the first place was
because it was in English and any potential threat in its content was
neutered by the language barrier. Since that time, The Al-Hamlet Summit has
been performing in Arabic across the world but never, ever, has it been
performed in Arabic within the Arab world.

But it is not only official bodies who act as the censors. Censorship has
been internalised by parts of the population and the press. There is a
long-held belief in the Arab world that it is wrong to "hang out our dirty
washing" and that public self-criticism ranks as a kind of treason. I have
now lost count of the number of times I have been labelled a traitor for my
own writing - it was once even publicly suggested that my work receives
funding from the CIA. That said, it is a testament to the forces of
liberalism in my own country, Kuwait, that my work finds itself defended
internationally by many prominent individuals in society as well as by the
government itself. If this was not the case, I would be more than wary of
writing this article.

It is in this game of cat and mouse between theatre and the thought police
that Shakespeare's texts come up trumps. The texts are dicey, metaphorical,
slippery; they say and they don't say, they offend without offending, they
are the perfect simulacra, the ultimate mask.

Masks abound in the mental repertoire of authors and directors in the Arab
world. By force, one discovers myriad ways of hiding the real intention -
historical plays that couch critique in an idealised past, absurd black
comedies that contort themselves to get satire to do anything other than
cajole an audience into sniggering at its woes, and so on. But with
Shakespeare - for exactly the same reasons that avant-garde practitioners
and postmodern critics put the boot in - because the texts are old,
established, revered pieces of High Art that carry within them the stamp of
global accreditation, of a global institution, of a global industry, the
radical theatre-maker has, vis-à-vis the censor, not merely a mask but a
bulletproof face.

Shakespeare adapted, Shakespeare twisted, gutted and re-stuffed, mutated,
metamorphosed or straight; all remain useful to the radical theatre-maker
outside of the benevolent, permissive spheres of western cultural
production.

What drives myself and other writers, such as Alfred Faraj (Egypt), Jawad
Al-Assadi (Iraq) and Sa'adallah Al-Wannous (Syria), or directors like Salah
El-Qassab, Awni Karoumi (Iraq) and Fadhil Jou'abi (Tunisia), to work with
and on Shakespeare is not a mercantile desire to cash in on the
Shakespearian corporate tag (good luck to those who can!) nor, as some
Shakespeareans might have it, to ape our former colonial masters. It is,
rather, the belief that with "Shaikh Al-Zubair" as our partner, we can
inquire deeper into the pressing concerns of our people, and of the world
outside.

·Sulayman Al-Bassam is a Kuwaiti writer and director. He is working on an
Arabic adaptation of Richard III (The Baghdad Richard) as part of the RSC's
complete works festival.





Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com