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Tim Abrahams, The Sunday Herald
:
THE BARD TAKES A FLYER
That production seems even more trivial when compared with the
urgent, vital adaptation
by Zaoum Theatre called The Al-Hamlet Summit. Here the writer Sulayman
Al-Bassam has not merely altered the plot but rewritten the entire play
in his own words, and he has the most urgent and vital of reasons. Set
in a unspecified modern Arab state, Al-Hamlet
is a superbly constructed dramatisation of a society's descent into
fundamentalism and chaos. To have created such an impressive
piece of writing himself, Sulayman has clearly mastered Hamlet and its
politics, sexual and otherwise. Ingeniously
staged and almost impeccably acted, its elegiac finale pushes it into
the realm of the sublime.