Nehad Selaiha enjoys a Hamletian feast at the Creativity Centre Of all the foreign dramas translated into Arabic, including Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet has been the most influential since the 1950s. Not only has its language, particularly Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and phrases like "The time is out of joint" or "Frailty, thy name is woman", found its way into the rhetoric of political writers and intellectuals and even in the daily speech of the educated, it has also haunted the imagination of playwrights, directors and actors, appearing in different guises to address different needs at different historical moments. Echoes of Hamlet abound in many of the best dramas produced in the 1960s, and at least three tragedies, Alfred Farag's Sulayman Al-Halabi and Al-Zeir Salem and Salah Abdel Sabour's The Tragedy of Al-Hallaj, modeled their heroes on the Prince of Denmark, giving them more or less the same moral/political/ existential dilemmas. While the play itself has not received many 'textually unadulterated' productions -- the most famous and memorable being Sayed Bedeir's at the Opera house in 1964/65, starring the late, great Karam Metawi', and Mohamed Subhi's 1978 one, in which he also played the title role -- it has inspired a spade of stage adaptations, original plays and what can be best described as ironic, inter-textual engagements. In her extensively researched, well informed and deeply insightful doctoral dissertation on the appropriation of Hamlet by Arab culture between 1952 and 2002 (entitled Hamlet's Arab Journey: Adventures in Political Culture and Drama, soon to be published in book form), American scholar Margaret Litvin demonstrates that the different Arab Hamlet-appropriations since the 1952 Egyptian revolution 'fall into 4 main phases' that 'have corresponded to the prevailing political moods in the region'. The first phase (1952-64) was one of 'euphoric pride after the 1952 revolution', and in it 'Arab dramatists' preoccupations with Hamlet were focused on [achieving literary and theatrical] international standards'. The second phase (1964-67) was one of 'soul-searching and impatience for progress' and 'Hamlet's incorporation into Arab political drama' then took the form of what Litvin calls (in the manuscript of her thesis, which she has graciously sent me, and from which all the above quotations and the ones that follow are taken): a '"Hamletization" of the Arab Muslim political hero'. 'Such Hamletization,' she goes on to say, 'was an easy way for Arab playwrights to emulate (and borrow) Hamlet's complexity of characterization and to obtain the moral and political standing it conferred. Thus the critical demand for deep, complex, yet politically topical characters encouraged serious dramatists to weave strands of Hamlet in their heroes -- in turn linking the character of Hamlet with the theme of earthly justice in the audience's imagination' (Litvin, pp, 12, 13. 82). The third phase, according to Litvin, was one of 'anger and defiance' following 'the disastrous June War of 1967' (p.13) and the collapse of Nasser's socialist Arab nationalist project. Between 1967 and 1976, the use of Hamlet as an allegory for political local conditions underwent a change, embracing political agitation as its purpose, and targeting the audience rather than the regime. The 'Hamletized' heroes of this phase were consequently less complex than their predecessors. As Litvin puts it: 'Rather than thinkers whose towering subjectivity qualified them as political agents, they began to appear simply as martyrs: uncomplicated fighters for justice who challenged an unjust political order' (p. 111). The best of such treatments of Hamlet, and perhaps the last, was Mohamed Subhi's 1976/77 memorable production. By the time Subhi staged his Hamlet, however, the political scene had completely changed, ushering in Litvin's fourth phase of Arab Hamlet - appropriations: Nasser had died in 1970 and Sadat had succeeded him, swinging the state ideologically to the Right, introducing a rabid form of laisser-faire economy and launching peace negotiations with Israel -- the Arabs' 'historical enemy'. As the old dreams collapsed, the mood of anger and defiance which informed Subhi's production soon gave way to one of 'cynicism and nostalgia' (p. 13). For the next 30 years, as Litvin rightly argues, re-writers of Hamlet have sought 'to turn the text upside down or inside out, redeploying its allegorical resonance for ironic effect.' Rather than try to '"wipe out" or displace Shakespeare's text in the audience's minds, they stake out a new position between Shakespeare and their audience, emphasizing their plays' divergence from an "original" Hamlet that remains present in memory as a dialogizing background. They can play this game,' she goes on to explain, 'because their audiences already know (the stock interpretation of) that "original" rather well' -- an interpretation 'that casts Hamlet as a justice-seeking Arab revolutionary hero.' In this fourth, post- mid-1970s phase of Hamlet- rewritings, 'the audience is invited to weigh the new protagonists against that hero and to find them wanting: they are Hamlets in name alone' (p. 154). To prove her point, Litvin examines 6 rewritings of Hamlet that belong to this phase and span a quarter-century. Though they are written by authors/directors of different Arab nationalities, for different audiences, and 'differ in plot, verbal register, and visual style', most of them play 'against their audiences' expectations of a heroic protagonist�[in order] to mock and mourn the inflated hopes of Arab nationalism.' Furthermore, 'irony marks every feature of these plays: Standard ideological commitments are mocked; slogans about justice are portrayed as empty, or, at best, correct but unrealizable. Time runs backwards, in circles, or in a disjointed flashback structure where Hamlet always seems to "wake up" late. The other characters already seem to know Shakespeare's plot.' The world they all depict is one 'in which heroism is not possible' and where Claudius is 'mythified as a beast.' In this world, 'Hamlet is caught in a no-win dilemma, a choice between impotent ideals (the ghost of Nasserism is never far from view) and a monstrous reality.' Unlike their predecessors who used Hamlet 'to inspire any political change, be it reform in their regimes or revolutionary mobilization in their audiences,' the post-mid-1970s Hamlet -rewriters use the play 'to cast an ironic light on the contemporary Arab situation and the men it produces,' taking 'refuge from despair' in 'post-political laughter and tears' (pp. 155-57). It is a pity that Litvin failed to include in this valuable study two interesting stage adaptations of Hamlet by Khalid Galal that fall within the temporal boundaries of her study. Though they do not focus on politics, they display some aspects of the fourth-phase versions of the play she analyses, including an overriding ironic bent, a depiction of reality as monstrous and absurd, and a 'disjointed flashback structure'. The first of these was presented at Al-Tali'a theatre in March/April, 1998 as part of a quartet of Shakespearean tragedies, which carried the title Shakespeare, One, Two, and included Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Placed within an outer framework consisting of a prologue, an epilogue and one short interlude at the end of part 1, and featuring a third-rate theatre company clumsily auditioning for and rehearsing a trite show under the eye of a pompous, pretentious and despotic director, the four plays were projected in brief, rapid scenes that translated chunks of the dialogue into flashing, vibrant theatrical images. They followed each other at an exhilarating pace, like a videotape alternately freeze-framed and fast forwarded, and only slowing down at the crucial scenes that focused the themes of love and death. To further frame those themes, Galal occasionally broke the original order of the scenes, playing them backwards, forwards, or synchronically. The style of mocking, light-hearted parody adopted in Othello and Romeo and Juliet gave way to gruesome surrealism in the case of Macbeth and Hamlet. There, the central characters were split, doubled, or multiplied, so that at one moment we would be hearing and seeing two, three, or more copies of them going through the motions of a scene alternately or at the same time. Indeed, at one dazzling moment we had as many as what seemed like 15 mirror reflections of Macbeth and his Lady, creating the frightful illusion of a lurid world peopled only by the likes of them. More harrowing still was Hamlet, a highly imaginative visual and aural composition that wound up this Shakespearean tetralogy, presenting the play as one might experience it in a nightmare. Here the characters not only split and merged, but also changed identities; the same scene was replayed by different actors; the two grave diggers, no longer philosophical clowns, were combined into one frightful, menacing presence; the murder of the king was replayed in flashes over and over and Ophelia was repeatedly dragged screaming to the grave, and all this to the sound of eerie shrieks, unearthly howls, pitiful groans, clanking chains and echoes of jumbled bits of the dialogue and of Hamlet's soliloquies. In August 2001, Galal revisited Hamlet once more, but in a lighter mood this time. His Hamlet Junction projected the hero in different ages, ranging from medieval times to the future, and in places as geographically far apart as Denmark and Upper Egypt. It was a Hamlet seen through the eyes of a group of actors in the present who are not above using music hall numbers and routines, modern dance and cinema, as well as the shadow play, the puppet show and the traditional art of the popular story-teller to present their various readings of the play and views of its hero. Like Nadir Omran's 1984 'carnivalesque musical', A Theatre Company Found a Theatre �And "Theatred" Hamlet, which Litvin examines in detail, Galal's Hamlet Junction also (to borrow her words), 'sidesteps Hamlet's dilemma, instead opting to create a spontaneous, temporary community with the audience' (p. 215). Including these two famous and extremely popular Hamlet adaptations, which share some features with the post-mid-1970s' rewritings she discusses and, perhaps, look forward beyond them, would have no doubt enriched Litvin's work and made it more comprehensive. Margaret Litvin and her work were on my mind as I followed the three graduation projects recently presented by the students in the department of directing at the Creativity Centre's Studio, of which Khalid Galal is the head and artistic director. Since all were stage adaptations of Hamlet (most probably on Galal's suggestion), I kept wondering what she would make of them and whether she would think they pointed in a new direction different from the one adopted by most re-writers of the play she discusses. The first of these, Hani Afifi's at once hilariously funny and deeply sad , was previously aired in two performances at the end of last June, then once more during the National Egyptian Theatre festival at the beginning of July; I saw it then and reviewed it on this page (see the Weekly, 16 July, 2009, Issue No. 956). However, watching it again, in the light of Litvin's thesis, I found myself reading a new meaning in its identification of Fortinbras with George W. Bush. Whereas in most rewritings of the play since the mid-1970, 'Claudius becomes a protean and all-powerful force who dominates the play', signifying the unshakable power of Arab regimes and the futility of trying to do anything to dislodge them, as Litvin argues, by making Fortinbras, dressed in a business suit, walk in at the end of his version to view the corpses, including that of Claudius, and mimicking the language of George W. Bush while the screen at the back shows the actual ex-president of the USA on television addressing the world, Hani Afifi seemed to shift the centre of power from local politics and regimes to Bush's 'new world order' in which the USA is the sole super power, and to pitch the play into a thoroughly globalized world. Afifi could have been influenced in this by Sulayman Al-Bassam's Al-Hamlet Summit, in which 'Claudius' last speech, a televised address declaring war on "terrorist positions belonging to Hamlet and his army", lifts from current speeches by George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ariel Sharon' and his 'magical powers are transferred upstairs -- to the United States, global capitalism, oil interests, etc' (Manuscript, pp. 214, 213). Al-Bassam's play, which he himself directed, was performed at the Creativity Centre during the 2002 Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre and Afifi, a budding director then, is sure to have seen it. Mohamed Abdel-Rahman's Half Hour Hamlet seemed like an initial sketch yet to be developed. Why half an hour and not 45 minutes or an hour is never made clear. Drastically abridged, with only the principal characters left, and most of the scenes removed, or fleetingly mimed (in a kind of gestural shorthand), and the ones kept (mainly the closet, Ophelia's funeral and grave-diggers scenes) reduced to a few words, this version begins near the end, with Hamlet standing in the graveyard while Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia and Polonius, enveloped in clouds of smoke, move around on a raised platform at the back, against an imposing structure tipped by a dagger and a crown. Such an opening clearly suggests that the scenes that follow are memories flitting through Hamlet's mind in disjointed order and coloured by his own feelings. This would explain, and even justify, the many omissions, the shadowy, often silent presence of all the characters except Hamlet, the scenic merging and overlapping and the disconcerting transposition of famous soliloquies and lines to other scenes. It would hardly explain, however, why Hamlet's role was divided among six, similarly dressed actors who took turns speaking what was left of his lines, or repeated certain lines singly, in succession, or, sometimes, in unison, like a chorus. Intended, I guess, as a play of shadows, echoes and flitting images, this Half Hour Hamlet can only make sense for an audience conversant with Shakespeare's text. Such an audience, however, would still find the reduction of Ophelia's part to a single scream at the sight of her murdered father, after which she drops dead, quite ridiculous, even farcical, and would feel quite at a loss as to the purpose of the whole exercise -- unless, of course, one takes it as a kind of obsequy announcing the final demise of Hamlet as a relevant text in our times. The last Hamlet offshoot in this event was Sa'daa' Al-Da'aas's Hamlet- hunna (Women's Hamlet). An all-women production, it was a really pleasant surprise that harked back to the days when great Egyptian actresses, like Fatma Rushdi and Amina Rizq, took on the parts of famous dramatic heroes, including Hamlet. With 2 gifted young actresses (Nora Ismat and Amira Abdel-Rahman), a female violin player (Naglaa' Yunis), a talented female costume designer (Marwa 'Ouda) an efficient female assistant director (Shaimaa' Abdel-Qadir), and an empty stage, barring one chair, Al-Da'aas presented Hamlet as a story obsessively remembered and recounted/reenacted by Gertrude and Ophelia after death. The performance begins with Ophelia sprawled on a chair, as if lifeless, and Gertrude slumped on the floor before her, reciting her well-known mournful speech over Ophelia's grave in the play, while throwing fistfuls of rose petals over the dead body behind her. Suddenly, Ophelia gives a loud gasp and sits up shouting that she has been 'deceived'. She begs Gertrude to help her go over the story of their lives once more and Gertrude reluctantly accepts, warning her that this will be the last time and, therefore, they have to play it through to the end. This implies that the two women have done this before but always broke off somewhere before the end, and that this is perhaps the reason why their souls cannot rest. At once there is anticipation, dramatic excitement, suspense: what is it, one wonders, that compels these women to go over the past, time and again, breaking off at some point? And what is it that they hope to discover in their all too familiar story? From that moment on, time runs backwards, in a circle, encompassing the events that led up to the two women's violent deaths. Though the story they re-enact, impersonating all the male characters, does not differ from the story in the play, it rearranges the order of the scenes, leaving out some, merging some and highlighting others. The result is a shift of the focus from Hamlet and the themes of revenge and justice to the two women and their turbulent personal relationships with the male characters in the play. Indeed, this version of Hamlet seems to protest the marginal status of Gertrude and Ophelia in the original play and seeks to correct the situation not only by removing the male characters and putting the two women alone centre-stage, but also by allowing them to understand what is happening around them (a knowledge that Shakespeare denies them) through impersonating the men and thus entering into their hearts and thoughts. Al-Da'aas goes a step further and, in her only divergence from her original source, allows the two women a glimpse of the Ghost. It is as if taking their cue from Hamlet who devised a play-within- the-play to 'catch the king's conscience', Ophelia and Gertrude decide to perform Hamlet in order to 'catch' Shakespeare's meaning and understand what happened around them and caused their suffering and death. It is true that awareness comes to Ophelia and Gertrude too late, when they are dead; still one draws comfort from the fact that, before the action comes full circle and the two women resume their former postures at the beginning, at least they know why they had to die. Indeed, what saves Hamlet-hunna from becoming a mere gimmick, or simply a vehicle to showcase the two actresses' versatility and talent is the fact that while Ophelia declares at the beginning that she has been 'deceived', it is only after the two women go through the past, enacting it detachedly, as if it were a play and not real life, that Gertrude gets to realize that she, too, was 'deceived' and betrayed and the full meaning of this word in relation to both women is revealed. Without the two women realizing it, this discovery at the end gives dramatic purpose to the game of remembering they play and invests it with dramatic tension. Though feminist in conception and intent, Hamlet-hunna is blissfully free of didacticism and sloganeering. The acting, alternately passionate and detached, playfully comical and grimly serious, together with the constant role switching and the extensive re-arrangement, transposition and redistribution of the characters' lines, which kept the audience (familiar with the text) constantly alert and surprised, actively worked against this, subverting any potential, didactic, feminist message. Nevertheless, as an artistic triumph, a thoroughly exciting and thought-provoking theatrical experience, Hamlet-hunna was feminist in the truest and profoundest sense of the word: a celebration of women and female creativity.
