Al-Bassam’s "Speaker’s Progress" in Beirut

Sympathetic review of The Speaker’s Progress in The Daily Star suggests that the overall design works but there are still some surtitle glitches to be ironed out.  I’m not surprised, since Sulayman Al-Bassam, a compulsive editor and re-editor, was probably tinkering with the script until ten minutes before the curtain went up.

…the surtitles are projected above and to the back of the stage. This is a problem as one cannot possibly simultaneously read the translation and observe the on-stage action. Forsaking either diminishes the viewer’s experience of the performance, because the strength, wit and entertainment of this play definitely lie in its combination of text, acting and set design.
The envoys commence the performance nervously, on a stage surrounded by bureaucratic apparatus and presided over by The Speaker and a censor who sounds an alarm whenever dialogue is improvised or the action drifts from its state-sanctioned course.
A meter stick is amusingly employed to ensure that the official 90-centimeter distance is maintained between male and female players at all times.
As the play progresses, the spirit of the theater begins to take over. Digressions from the approved performance increase in regularity. The set, lighting and costumes evolve from bleak greys, whites and blacks to colorful oranges, reds and yellows. Eventually the cry rises, in English, “Defect!”
While the momentum is building, alas, the surtitles are falling apart. As they lapse several lines behind the onstage dialogue, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand who is saying what, especially when there are more than two members of the 10-man cast engaged in conversation. It becomes frustrating.
Meanwhile the progressively absurdist nature of what’s happening beneath the translation also grows challenging to follow.

Ironically, Beirut may be a less welcoming audience for this show than Boston and New York (coming up next month!).  In Lebanon, from what I gathered last May, no one wants to hear too much about the Arab Spring.  Further, Al-Bassam doesn’t get any “exoticity discount” (do you know what I mean?) for directing a show in Arabic.  And he has discovered before (with an ill-fated musical Tartuffe adaptation that was cleverly intended for Gulfi audiences who were summering in Lebanon but that ended up playing instead for sophisticated Beirutis, who were underwhelmed) that it can be a tough market to gauge.

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‘To Be or Not To Be’ in Lebanon?

Here’s the slide from my AUB talk that the Daily Star reporter was alluding to. I took this photo in late Feb 2005 – it’s the graffiti around Martyrs’ Square (later Liberty Square) in downtown Beirut, where people were commemmorating the Valentine’s Day 2005 car-bomb assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Can you see the faint writing, in English, right at the bottom of the photo? 

“To be or not to be now is the time.”

And here’s another example of Lebanon-related “to be or not to be” rhetoric: Walid Jumblatt (this was before he broke with the March 14 grouping) saying a rally was absolutely crucial to the existential future of Lebanon

“Notre combat c’est “être ou ne pas être.” No hyperbole or anything.

Flew home from glorious Beirut yesterday.  Sigh.

Daily Star covers our Shakespeare conference at AUB

Under the nice headline “Was Shakespeare an Orientalist?” Beirut’s Daily Star covers  our just-concluded conference on “Shakespeare’s Imagined Orient” at AUB.  Splendidly organized by Francois-Xavier Gleyzon of AUB’s English department, the conference staged a conversation some of the most important scholars working to remap Shakespeare’s relationship to the Muslim world.  Five men were at the center of this conversation: Jerry Brotton, Dan Vitkus, Gerald Maclean, Jonathan Burton, and Gil Harris.  My talk was really marginal to the whole thing (I’m not an early modernist), but for obvious journalistic reasons (even if she is not Arab, her readers are), the Daily Star reporter seized on it.  She thus ironically supported Ferial Ghazoul’s thesis (in “The Arabization of Othello“), which my talk was trying to problematize: the idea that when Arabs look at Shakespeare, “their point of view” (many Arabs, one point of view) leads them to an immediate and almost exclusive focus on the representation of people like themselves.  Well, perhaps such narcissism is only human. Which of us can pick up a friend’s book without looking up our own name in the index?