The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy

The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy is a set of three plays by the Anglo-Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam, collected in 2014, that rebuild Hamlet, Richard III and Twelfth Night inside the modern Middle East. For the HSC, the trilogy is studied in English Extension 1 for the elective Shakespearean worlds.

Sulayman Al-Bassam is an Anglo-Kuwaiti playwright and director who, after the attacks of 11 September 2001, "felt I needed to return to the Arab world". The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy (collected in 2014) is the work of that return: three plays that take three of Shakespeare's most political dramas and rebuild them inside the modern Middle East. The Al-Hamlet Summit (2002) reworks Hamlet; Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007), the first Arabic play the Royal Shakespeare Company ever commissioned, reworks Richard III; and The Speaker's Progress (2011) reworks Twelfth Night. Together they form a single darkening arc from the language of diplomacy, through the language of tyranny, to the silencing of theatre itself.

In the first play, Elsinore becomes a summit conference in an oil-rich state: Claudius proclaims a "New Democracy", Hamlet radicalises into the leader of an armed Islamist opposition, and an interpolated Arms Dealer moves among all factions, selling weapons to every side. In the second, Gloucester's England becomes a Gulf petro-monarchy where Richard schemes to the throne with the Quran held up for the cameras and the backing of a Western power broker who props him up and then discards him. In the third, the lightest of Shakespeare's comedies becomes the darkest of the plays: a state "Speaker" stages a reconstruction of a banned 1960s Arab adaptation of Twelfth Night under the eye of a regime that has outlawed theatre, and the act of playing becomes an act of defiance.

Al-Bassam is candid that Shakespeare is both lens and alibi - "frontal criticism of Gulf monarchs is illegal; it is a state security offence" - a canonical prestige that lets a dangerous political argument be spoken at a protective distance.

The trilogy's first and largest concern is appropriation itself, and its governing insight is that the traffic runs both ways. Al-Bassam set himself the challenge of "how to render Hamlet a story about the birth of Islamic religious fanaticism fuelled by domestic corruption and Western opportunism", and his signature technique is interpolation: the real words of bin Laden, Qutb and Bush spliced into Shakespeare's structures. When Hamlet's questioning gives way to "the time for the pen has passed and we enter the era of the sword", the modern context does not merely borrow Hamlet, it reinterprets it - exposing how much the original was always about the collapse of thought into deed.

Across all three plays Al-Bassam anatomises how illegitimate power manufactures its own legitimacy. Claudius christens a coup a "New Democracy" and calls himself the people's "lamb"; Richard is staged as a man of God, Buckingham directing him to "take this Quran in your hand, look morose, deepen your voice ... and around you we'll build a very holy discourse". The verb "build" is the whole point: piety is a set that can be constructed, and the critique lands on the cynical performance of faith, never on faith itself.

Shakespeare's interest in the outsider is relocated to the geopolitics of intervention. The Arms Dealer professes friendship while selling ruin - "we would like to develop something with you, and promote your agenda" - and the play refuses Shakespearean closure, ending on the stage direction that the Arms Dealer "walks towards Fortinbras incredibly slowly": no restored order, only the trade moving to its next client. Richard's fall completes the arc - "They saw you possessing oil ... and they would restrain the one and disdain the other" - the autocrat grasping too late that he was a client, not a partner.

The third play turns the argument onto theatre itself. The Speaker voices a regime's dread of performance in an escalating tricolon - theatre "contaminates. It sours. It poisons" - while the fool Feylooti answers that "the flowers of paradise are not haram", relocating blame from religion onto its political manipulation. By invoking the Puritan closure of English theatres, Al-Bassam yokes Islamist and Puritan censorship as one recurring impulse, and the trilogy ends defending the stage's own right to exist.

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• As You Like It
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
• Possession
• An Artist of the Floating World
• The Glass Menagerie
• All HSC English resources