For the Record: Conversation with Sulayman Al-Bassam

APPENDIX For the Record: Conversation with Sulayman Al-Bassam Margaret Litvin, Interview with Sulayman Al-Bassam, Beirut, May 8, 2011 “ re we recording? Can I begin?” asks Ophelia in Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit [AHS] (2002), poised for the video testimonial that will mark her transformation into a suicide bomb- A1 er. Recordings feature even more prominently in the second play of his Arab Shakespeare Trilogy, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy [R3] (2007), com- missioned in Arabic by the Royal Shakespeare Company: the royal family runs a slick satellite television station called York TV; Gloucester’s “citi- zen scene” turns into a pre-recorded Islamic TV call-in show; and Palace Consultant Buckingham, whose correspondences with the U.S. Embassy have infiltrated but not really endangered the York regime, gives a taped confession before he is crudely asphyxiated.2 And the power of recording is absolutely central to the Trilogy’s final work: The Speaker’s Progress [TSP] (2011) is built around a recording of a 1963 localized adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: as fragments of this play-within-a-play circu- late virally online, a Director-turned-regime-apologist and his government- sponsored technicians re-create, then come to inhabit, the ludic worldview in which theater is thinkable and revolution is possible.3 Life has mirrored art. Some preliminary rehearsal videos from The Speaker’s Progress were posted on YouTube; ironically, however, over the spring of 2011 Al-Bassam’s own copy of the videos somehow disappeared, sucked into the recesses of a government cultural agency from where they have neither been returned nor officially submitted to the state censorship 222 M Appendix office. So the play’s premise of a society where theater is strictly regulated and where performance recordings carry subversive power – a view that at first glance might have seemed like self-dramatization on the part of this widely fêted playwright/director, whose work is produced and celebrated in Kuwait and whose program notes sometimes pay tribute to Kuwaiti democracy – turns out to be truer than even Al-Bassam had imagined.4 The conversation below probes some of the ironies of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s double-edged career as a bilingual, intercultural Anglo-Arab adapter of Shakespeare over the past decade. It was audio-recorded in Beirut in early May 2011. Lebanon itself was very calm, but from all sides came news of ups and downs in the “Arab Spring” (a problematic term that we will continue to use as scare-quoted shorthand for the events of January-February 2011 and ensuing developments), pushing Al-Bassam to rapidly rework the script of TSP ahead of scheduled fall performances in Beirut, Brooklyn, and Boston. He and I have subsequently edited the tran- script and inserted subheadings, but the interview remains bound to the thoughts and sentiments of the historical moment in which it was recorded: Egypt and Tunisia in still-hopeful transition, Jordan and Morocco experi- menting with monarchy-protecting reforms, Syria and Bahrain in rebel- lion, Libya and Yemen in flames. Some of the plot and character revisions we discuss were subsequently incorporated into the play. I believe this dialogic, explicitly contextualized format, which puts the artist and the critic directly into conversation, is particularly appropriate for this volume’s inquiry into the ethical dimensions of appropriation. For even while Al-Bassam has appropriated Shakespeare, the critical establish- ment has appropriated Al-Bassam. He has been invited to speak at university campuses; references to his work appear in such works as Ewan Fernie’s Spiritual Shakespeares and the third series Arden Hamlet.5 The two levels of appropriation have intersected, as Al-Bassam’s Shakespeare adaptations have been produced in increasingly close dialogue with his scholarly critics. For instance, at an October 2011 panel discussion at Boston University, flanked by two professional interpreters of his work (Graham Holderness and myself), Al-Bassam said his political take on Twelfth Night in TSP had been inspired in part by Holderness’ journal article, “Rudely Interrupted: Shakespeare and Terrorism,” on the 2003 suicide bombing in Doha of a theater producing Twelfth Night.6 Holderness’ perceptive reading of Malvolio as an Islamist had in turn been conditioned, if not directly suggested, by Al-Bassam’s earlier portrait of a militant Islamist Hamlet, “dazed by the stench of rot” (AHS 34) in his authoritarian Arab homeland. In light of such deep collaborative relationships, it would be hypocritical to insist on a heuristic separation between the creative process and its analytical twin. Appendix M 223 Besides Shakespeare, the other main element appropriated in Al-Bassam’s Trilogy is the Arab world: its language registers, its cultures, and above all its recent history. Over time, Al-Bassam’s approach to current events has shifted. AHS, written in the immediate aftermath of September 11, was conceived “after a night of channel surfing between BBC World, Al-Jazeera, CNN and Iraqi TV, which gave me an acute dose of the back street snuff theater that is world politics;”7 Al-Bassam’s Claudius borrowed lines from Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, and Ariel Sharon. Nine years later, TSP took a cooler approach, alluding to “the Arab Spring” but focusing more on the fragile miracle of theatricality itself. (“The theater can not be simply an annex to the newsroom,” Al-Bassam told National Public Radio journalist Tom Ashbrook in an onstage conversation at the Boston performance.8) It is the later play, with fewer literally matchable “real” details, that paints the more nuanced portrait of an Arab society. While AHS reconfirms many Anglo-American stereotypes about Arab culture, TSP successfully provincializes them. Sidelining the audience’s “knowledgeable ignorance”9 (or stubborn attachment to outdated stereotypes) about the culture leaves room for a more open-ended exploration of the ongoing history. As our conversation shows, Al-Bassam’s Arab Shakespeare Trilogy has gained its ethical traction from its insistent contemporaneity. To a greater extent than I was willing to acknowledge before the full triptych had come into view,10 his Shakespeare appropriations seek to comment honestly (and thus, of course, provisionally) on a specific decade-long slice of historical time (2001–2011) more than on the Arab world as a fixed geographic or cultural place. Our conversation below is offered in the same spirit. ML: Why did you decide to start calling your three Shakespeare-based plays, produced over a decade, “The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy?” SAB: TSP is the final part of a unified body of dramatic work. It was conceived as the final volley in a three sequence movement. True, the idea of three sequential parts developed as the works were made, but nonetheless, once I’d made R3, a piece influenced in turn by AHS, it was inevitable that there should be a concluding work, therefore a trilogy. All of these pieces explore in their own, different ways a the- matically coherent body of issues, namely: power, corruption, radical ideologies, the forces that move societies towards fracture, dissolution, or in the case of TSP, just major change. There is a unity of moral tenor, a double-edged political critique running through the Trilogy. All of the pieces are highly critical of dominant political practices 224 M Appendix inside the Arab world whilst also exposing the face of Western political opportunism that has informed so much of the history of this region. The result of this double-edged moral thrust is that neither Arab audiences nor their Western counterparts can watch these pieces without feeling a sense of discomfort. Allegory across Cultures? ML: It seems that every time I see you we have the same conversation, and it’s about the referent of allegory. SAB: Is that the case? ML: It is. About where the allegory goes. Does it go to an unnamed Middle Eastern state? Does it go to an unnamed Gulf kingdom on the verge of a succession crisis? Does it go to an unnamed but recogniz- ably Islamic authoritarian state, where art has been forbidden? And if so, doesn’t this unnamed, inchoate, and yet incredibly familiar caricature mirror in alarming ways the inchoate but familiar caricature about the Arab or Islamic world fed to us by our Western media, once you’ve de-localized it and de-racinated it from local specificity? That’s why we always have this conversation. SAB: No, I don’t think the non-specificity of it has to move it towards a kind of negative stereotyping. To look at it another way: if you gave specificity of place to any of those allegories, at the end of the day, you have a kind of allegorical framework as well that the piece is working within. ML: An allegory is an allegory of something. SAB: Absolutely. Elsinore or Pomfret Castle operates on an allegorical level. ML: As allegories for England. It’s true that allegories can be multifari- ous, they can apply both to France and England without a problem, and they can be shifting. One of my colleagues, Jerry Brotton, uses the word “flicker,” so at some moments they seem this and at some moments they seem that. But when you are talking about an overde- termined, over-stereotyped region, this is a pretty dodgy move. SAB (after a longish pause): Because you think that by removing specificity of location or time or place — not that time is underspecified actu- ally — that you fall into a sort of religio-ethnic kind of generalization that inevitably draws the discourse toward recognizable forms of that typology? ML: Precisely. I do! The example that I use in my talks about your work is the quote from the reviewer of your AHS who found it an invaluable Appendix M 225 guide to “the nightmares now brewing in the cauldrons of the Middle East.” In the Western viewer’s mind there’s already a cauldron of nightmares.

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