"I’m Hamlet" to play in London 2012 Festival

Young Egyptian director Hani Afifi will stage his Hamlet adaptation, انا هاملت or I’m Hamlet, as part of the London 2012 festival around the Olympics, reports the Seventh Day site (in Arabic).  The play premiered at Cairo’s Creativity Center in the summer of 2009 and was well received at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre that September; Muhammad Fahim, in the role of Hamlet, won the festival’s Best Actor prize.  My favorite line is where Hamlet asks Ophelia (in the equivalent of the nunnery scene, which takes place at Cairo’s upscale Cafe Cilantro: “But how can I date someone who has 500 friends on Facebook?”

Globe’s young-adult Macbeth in UAE

Take a break from watching a bloody dictator fight to the death against foreign-supported rebels on satellite TV… to watch one do it on stage.

London’s Globe Theatre educational project (Globe Education’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank) is bringing its “educational” version of Macbeth to the UAE.  The performance of the show, created specifically for teenagers, was last night at the Abu Dhabi Theatre (would love to hear about audience reception from anyone who was there) and on March 27 and 28 at Al Madinat Theatre, Dubai.

Al-Bassam on Speaker’s Progress in The Guardian

Sulayman Al-Bassam has a little article in The Guardian on how his current show, a very pessimistic frame story incorporating an Arab adaptation of Twelfth Night,
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has changed in production because of recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.
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More photos from the production previews here.
The show is coming to BAM in New York next fall.

Update on Arabic Tempest

Update – It’s Sulayman Al-Bassam directing the Arabic-language Tempest at the Globe Theatre next year.
A certain lack of imagination on their part, I daresay — but at least they can be confident it will be well done.

Latest update (May 8, 2011): I talked to Sulayman and he is no longer involved in this project.  Decided there was not so much that he could interestingly do with The Tempest right now.  Stay tuned for more on the whole Olympiad-related extravaganza, and let me know if you have more details.