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The Scotsman

Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, Thursday,8th August, 2002
A PLAY FOR OUR TIMES THE AL-HAMLET SUMMIT

THE room is set up like a conference hall somewhere in the Arab world, or perhaps like the legislative assembly of a small modern state. There are desks with push-button microphones and headsets. Behind, there is a screen, as if someone planned to give a Powerpoint presentation. But the names on the desks are the familiar characters from Hamlet. The setting of Sulayman Al Bassam’s powerful, disturbing version of the Hamlet story is a modern Middle-Eastern state whose old king has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, westernised dictator who has married the old king’s wife to legitimise his rule, and calls his regime a "new democracy".

The Al-Hamlet Summit is presented by Al Bassam’s London-based Zaoum Theatre Company with an English and international cast; and there are times when it seems a little glossily distant from the region it strives so passionately to represent.

But this show has three striking features. First, there is Al Bassam’s astonishing text, which rarely echoes Shakespeare’s words, but takes the story of Hamlet and reworks it in a rich new poetic version, full of what sounds like Koranic and classical Arab imagery. Some of the results are electrifying.

Second, the show uses video and projected images in a seriously effective and disturbing way, the glare of burning oilfields haunting the action, characters observed by hidden cameras as they talk.

And finally, its story of Hamlet’s progression from dumb Oedipal rage to cold-eyed religious fundamentalism is chilling and utterly credible. It is as important for our understanding of the conflict looming over the world this month as the images of a transformed America in Eastcheap Rep’s Jumpers at the Underbelly.

This is not a perfect show; sometimes its intense poetic approach spills over into pretentiousness, sometimes its solemnity is wearing. But the acting is generally strong, the live music magnificent.
And I doubt whether this year’s Festival will produce another show so directly relevant to the nightmare that is brewing in the Middle East, or so vivid and eloquent in the theatrical means it uses to confront it.

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