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The Al-Hamlet Summit
ART1a: 1: Al-Bassam, Sulayman
...
" TheatreForum
22 (2003)- 85
...
"Arabic Adaptations of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory
...
3 (2013)- 4-28
...
, and Bryan Loughrey
...
"
Globalization and its Discontents (2006)
...
"Arab Shakespeare- Sulayman Al-Bassam's" The Al-Hamlet
Summit"
...

ART6a: Huang, Alexa, and Elizabeth Rivlin
...

Springer, 2014
...
"Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab journey- Shakespeare’s prince and
Nasser’s ghost
...

ART8a: Holderness, Graham
...
" (2007)- 124-143
...
"‘Silence bleeds’- Hamlet across borders- The Shakespearean
adaptations of Sulayman Al-Bassam
...
1 (2008)- 59-77
...
"When the Villain Steals the Show- The Character of Claudius in
Post-1975 Arab (ic) Hamlet Adaptations
...
2 (2007)- 196-219
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“SIX PLAYS IN SEARCH OF A PROTAGONIST, 1976–2002
...

142–182
...
"Am I Mad? Creating" The
Al-Hamlet Summit"
...

"In all the confusion of that night, I remember the words of one of the Palestinian actors: ''The hell
in New York today will bring hell to Ramallah tomorrow
...
” p1
"I had been away from Kuwait for eighteen years living in England and France and for the last six
years had been working with my London-based theatre company, Zaoum
...
In returning ''home''
with a piece of theatre, there was a lot I wanted to say
...
In looking for my way in, Shakespeare seemed a natural choice
...

You have to be a ballsy censor to say ''no'' to Hamlet
...
The
work on Hamlet in Kuwait had to undergo a similar encoding process, a cultural encoding that
would allow the work's meanings to override the various linguistic, cultural, and political barriers in
Kuwait and permit its meanings to explode in performance
...
The production, for instance, could not
appear unduly simple in its design for fear the largely bourgeois Kuwaiti audience would not
distinguish between minimalism and artistic poverty
...
It also had to be easily understood; enter a heightened visual language and
live musical underscoring
...
Essentially, I was
out to turn Hamlet into Kuwaiti pop and in doing so I dipped today's Kuwait, or my reading of it, into
a boiling pot of Elizabethan metaphor and technological conceit and presented the result both on
(and off) stage
...
” p2
"A few months after the success of Hamlet in Kuwait, an invitation came to present the piece on
the other side of the Arab world, in Tunisia
...
It was there that
the seeds of The Al-Hamlet Summit were sown in a piece entitled The Arab League Hamlet
...
In fact, as a result of decades of censorship, they had grown to
almost demand political significance from serious work
...
” p2
"I was using Shakespeare's Hamlet to present a template of today's Arab world
...
Indeed,
audiences and critics in Tunisia immediately read the work as a piece of radical agitprop
...
I had wanted them to feel the same voyeuristic thrill that the Arab one had felt in
listening to the forbidden word, hearing the forbidden thought, and witnessing the forbidden act… I
had imagined that the meaning of the work would be as transparent to Western audiences as it
was to the Arab audiences: I was wrong
...
” p3
"My only defense against this paralysis was to distance myself from the original I knew so well
...
This imagined Arab spectator was the guide that led me through the rewrite of
the play
...
They encompass political corruption, the twisted relationship
between willing puppets and their imperial masters, the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism;
suicide as a desperate form of political and self-expression, and the fact that the rhetoric of G
...

Bush, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ariel Sharon are all so stunningly similar that I was
able to lift quotes from each of them and place them back to back in one single speech
...
The actors were happy to oblige and so at
midnight the curtain went up again to a predominantly Arab-speaking audience
...
The opening scene that had previously been
received in silence and solemnity by English-speaking audiences, had the house rolling in laughter
...
” p4
"The reactions after the show and in the international Arab press were hi-polar and vehement
...
For others, and I'm happy to say the majority and particularly
the young, The Al-Hamlet Summit gave vital and much-needed expression to today's Arab
concerns and presented them to the West in a sophisticated and human form
...
"Arabic Adaptations of
Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory
...
3 (2013)- 4-28
...
Egypt, the Sudan,
Palestine, Trans Jordan and Iraq were directly colonised by Britain
...
And Libya fell under Italy
...
However, the case of French colonised Arab
countries, especially Algeria, was different
...
” p4-5
"For example, it has been widely documented that modern Arabic drama and theatre in particular
came into being as a result of the cultural contact between the Arab world and Europe after the
Napoleonic campaign to Egypt in 1798
...
Napoleon
Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt strengthened the cultural ties between Egypt and France, and
introduced theatre into Egypt
...
Hence it is through such
cultural encounters with the West, first France and then Britain, that Western drama entered the
Arab world
...
” p7
“Abaza acculturated Shakespeare, for in the second stanza of the poem he compares the threeroom house of the Bard to the cave hira where the Prophet Muhammad used to meditate just
before he received the Revelations
...
Abaza was not the last to mimic Shakespeare nor to sing his praises
...
The play, as Ferial Ghazoul judiciously
states in her article the 'Arabisation of Othello', 'touches chords of Arab sensibility and identity'
...
In this sense he is akin to Shakespeare's Prince of Morocco
who appears in The Merchant of Venice
...
It was first adapted, or

rather indigenised, in Arabic in the late nineteenth century under its Arabic name Utayl, or al-Qa'id
al-Moghrabi (Othello, the Moroccan General), or in other versions as Hiyal al-Ryjal (Wiles of Men)
...
” p12
"Indeed, from the beginning through to the twentieth century, the play has been subjected to
different interpretations
...
27” [T
...
A
...
”
p15
In doing so Abaza is seeking to express many things: first, his infatuation with the English Bard;
second, a desire to prove that the Arabic language is capable of incorporating world masterpieces
such as the works of William Shakespeare; three, a drive to 'write back' to the centre by rehashing
Shakespeare in order to express their resistance to imperialist domination in Egypt; and four, that
they are open to Western cultural negotiation in the sense that they are building bridges of cultural
communication with the more advanced West
...
” p17
" Shakespeare has also been moulded into other Arabic plays to represent local political situations
and to critique the dilemma of Arab intellectuals facing them” p20
"Of all Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet is perhaps the most often appropriated or interpolated into
Arabic drama and literature
...
Literary critics and scholars who have commented on postcolonial drama and
the repositioning of Shakespeare in postcolonial studies have glossed over Arabic literary
examples
...
It carries many concerns and issues
of today’s Arab world and its relationship to the West
...
The cross cultural construction of the piece create [sic]
a sense of implication in the affairs of the other
...
There is no moral
closure to the piece
...
They watch the piece with a great deal of

concentration and something bordering on ‘respect’
...
” p2
"what became apparent to me through these productions was the depth of charged political
meaning that Hamlet carried for audiences across the Arab world
...
” p2
“
...
” p2
"I think Shakespeare's world with its mixture of autocracy and feud, conspiracies, adoration of
rhetoric, and it's feudal structures has specific resonances for the Arab world” p2
"this monologue [Claudius’] was the impulse for the rest of the play and it sums up many of the
contradictions and dramatic tensions within the piece” p3
“
...
In the Al Hamlet Summit script they are given that opportunity to meet and, as a result, we
see them expressing two very different attitudes towards resistance/“ p4
"the ghost of old Hamlet is transformed into a shadowy network of propaganda and disinformation,
that drops leaflets over the city— in the same way American and British bombers leafleting Basra
today
...
Every Arab knows that George Bush said ‘either you are
with us or you are against us’ and everyone in the west now knows that Saddam is bad
...
All it does is
promote vacuous 'World views’
...
They permit
complexity and difference and they permit the weak to be other than pitied and the cruel to be
other than hated
...

Shakespeare understood that power very well
...
, and Bryan Loughrey
...
" Globalization and its
Discontents (2006)
...
2); that Shakespeare „goes native‟ every time
he crosses a geographic or national border, and „may thus be construed as the repositioned
product of a complex of social, cultural and political factors that variously combine under the
pressure of colonial, postcolonial and more narrowly national imperatives‟ (Cartelli 1999, p
...
A tale,
one might almost say, using D
...
Lawrence‟s terminology, of „The white races, having the arctic
north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow‟ (Lawrence 1982, p
...
” p10
"Hamlet is a play that seems to trade in whiteness, especially theatrically: ghosts, white faces in
the darkness, the pallor of melancholy, the bleached candour of the exhumated skull
...


And yet paradoxically this is the play of all plays that has the largest pretensions to universality,
„directly valid for all relations within a particular situation, and at least indirectly valid for all relations
of the same type‟ (Hallward, 2001, p
...
It is understood to universalise the experiences of
revenge, bereavement, alienation; to portray images of fundamental human emotions such as
mother-love, father-hate, the desire not to be
...
” p11
"„I discovered‟, says Sachs in Black Hamlet, „that the manifestations of insanity, in its form,
content, origin, and causation, are identical in both natives and Europeans‟ (Sachs, 1937, p
...
”
p11
"On the other hand his work can be accused of reproducing the native African in the image of white
imperialism, „colonisation by other means‟ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p
...
” p12
"The whiteness of Hamlet is that abstract whiteness that goes beyond skin colour, and renders
white supremacy a natural condition of existence, „the invisibility that fuels white hegemony‟ (Hall,
1998, p
...
” p12
"And yet for many native English speakers the language of Shakespeare is no more a natural form
of speech than it was to a speaker of John Chavafambira‟s tribal dialect
...
The key characters carry Shakespearean names, and occupy parallel situations within
their own modern Middle Eastern world
...
Gertrude and Ophelia, Polonius and Laertes all play roles comparable to those
of their Shakespearean namesakes, but redomesticated into an Islamic Arab context
...
Where Claudius in Shakespeare‟s play resolves
the Norwegian threat by diplomacy, Claudius in Al-Hamlet responds with violence and atrocity:”
p16
"Fortinbras‟s army is backed by the West, „armed with millions of dollars of foreign equipment‟
...
“ p16
"The West appears in the play in the shadowy persona of the Arms Dealer, who spoke English in
the Arabic version
...
He will provide weapons to anyone prepared to pay, even if he is arming opponents
...
Opposition and
dissent are read as fundamentalist terrorism
...
Both Hamlet and Ophelia become Islamicised,
adopting traditional Muslim costume; and both become „terrorists‟
...
”
p17
"Though he does not speak for Islamic fundamentalism or terrorist violence, Al- Bassam shows
them as the inevitable consequences of an alliance between native Arab totalitarianism and the
economic machinations of the West
...
“ p20

5: Holderness, Graham
...
"
Cultura, lenguaje y representación- revista de
estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I 4 (2007)141-150
...
Hamlet was «assimilated», said
Al-Shetawi (1999: 60), thoroughly woven into the «fabric of Arab creative processes»
...

«Transplanted» indicates not a simple exporting but a cross-cultural migration across borders, in
which the artefact becomes rooted in different soil, and there adapts itself to the local climate and
conditions
...
] Hamlet has always been viewed as a romantic hero
who sets out to fight corruption and dies for the cause of justice [
...
(AlShetawi, 1999: 49) “ p143
"Al-Bassam’s play maps a Middle Eastern political tragedy onto the template of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
...
The
conference-hall housing this «summit» meeting became the locus of the closet drama
...
The microcosm of the play was thus linked to the macrocosm of the
Gulf region, a site scarified by the impact of global geopolitics
...
” p144
"Ophelia is associated, as Yvette K
...
The equation between Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist militant is one that Hamlet also
internalises
...
” p145
"The Al-Hamlet Summit is divided into sections corresponding to the Islamic times of prayer («the
names of the Acts [
...
Though he is certainly an

active crusader against corruption and a militant for justice, Hamlet becomes wholly a man of
action, rejecting language and the intellect, committing himself unequivocally to material violence:
HAMLET: [
...
] No more
words [
...
] council is the weakest form of faith, now
we must mouth meaning with our flesh
...
«Religious dogma», writes Al-Bassam (2006: 24), «invades the piece from all
sides
...
Doubt and debate are hounded out of existence»
...

[(2006): The Al-Hamlet Summit, English and Arabic, Hatfield, University of Hertfordshire Press
...

In this process theatre has a critical role to play” p148

6: Litvin, Margaret
...
" Shakespeare and the Ethics of
Appropriation
...

107-129
...
” p107
"His career raises some questions about the eth- ics of appropriation: What are the ethical
implications of presenting Arab- themed British theater and Arab theater to non-Arab audiences
across newly sharpened post-9/11 cultural boundaries? What special risks and opportuni- ties are
added when the source texts come from Shakespeare, thus appear- ing to meet the Anglophone
audience on its “own” cultural ground? What are the adapter’s ethical obligations to the entities he
appropriates, namely Shakespeare’s texts and Arab cultures? Or—alternatively—might it be more
fruitful to avoid the language of duty altogether, and if so, why is this so difficult?” p107-8
“Such an audience is ignorant of the local artistic conventions that the experimen- tal work sets out
to challenge and against which the theater-maker creates meaning
...
It can mistake a stylized or even ironic appropriation of a certain cultural tradition—
be it a style of dress, music, movement, or speech— for a straightforward part of that tradition
...
Satire is misread as fact
...
If the Arab
artist derives much of his or her traction and efficacy from a position partly inside and partly outside
his or her home culture, the well-meaning Western audience neutralizes that effectiveness by
repositioning the artist squarely inside the home culture
...
At least audiences—if they are familiar
with the Shakespeare text or other produc- tions or adaptations—are forced to see the adaptor’s
hand at work, not sim- ply to interpret the work as a manifestation of its home culture
...
” p109
"Al-Bassam resets Shakespeare’s characters and plot in a tottering Arab dicta- torship holding an
Arab League-style conference (with nametags and micro- phones) while civil war engulfs the
country, international support withers, and a foreign army invades
...
” p111
"During the play, Hamlet metamorphoses into an Islamist militant deter- mined to “crush the fingers
of thieving bureaucrats, neutralize the hypo- crites, tame the fires of debauchery that engulf our
cities and return our noble people to the path of God
...
)
Ophelia, frustrated in her love and self-expres- sion, dies as a suicide bomber
...
Finally Fortinbras comes on, citing “bibli- cal claims upon this land,”
and proclaims “the dawn and the birth of the Greater
...
aaaa
...

All of them— Ophelia, Hamlet, Claudius, even Fortinbras—buy their weapons from the same
foreign arms dealer
...
Such understanding is itself a commodity,
of value precisely to peace-through-commerce globalists
...
This represents a gearshift for the Western audience as they gain
insight into why and how this transformation could happen
...
Smith was practically alone, but not wrong, to worry that it might be built on “a
sensationalism designed to exploit the ubiquity and deep-seatedness” of public anxieties about
Islamist terrorism and could “have the effect of exacerbating—even promoting—the racist
assumptions typified by the tabloid press
...
The char- acters are cardboard
...
The ubiquitous violence is predictable, even hypnotic (Holderness’
word “inevi- table” may index this)
...

26” p113
"The play builds on two pre-9/11 adaptations, Hamlet in Kuwait and The Arab League Hamlet,
staged in Kuwait and Tunisia by his London-based company
...
He “imagines” their various personal and local backgrounds, many
quite foreign to his own
...
35 They are a “concert” and
not a “chorus”—but he imagines them in order to amalgamate them into his own monologic

authorial voice, where they splinter again into the play’s haunting and pathetic but basically
interchangeable characters
...
However, some
hints of historical and cultural underlayers begin to peek out under the political collage, making the
2004 Arabic version more than simply a translation of his English text
...
” p117
"However, as we have seen, his plays reveal increasing ambivalence toward the role of
“ambassador” or agent of “inter-cultural dialogue
...
”53 This discomfort may stem from a growing distrust of
interculturalism; more fundamentally, it may reflect Al-Bassam’s unease with the project of didactic theater
...
"Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s
Arab journey- Shakespeare’s prince and Nasser’s
ghost
...

"To this end, she examines transla- tions, adaptations, theatrical performances and rewritings
before aptly linking them with the Arab region’s political preoccupations, frustrations and pan-Arab
aspirations, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War defeat and the death of Egypt’s ‛charismatic
leaderʼ (p
...
140)
...
Litvin argues that Hamlet’s discontent with what is ‛rotten in the stateʼ, his
mission to restore sociopolitical justice and his struggle to find his own voice, mould his own
destiny and earn his own salvation all converge neatly with the anxieties and aspirations of Arab
nationalists
...
Shakespeare was not viewed in the Arab world as a
representative of ‛Britishʼ colonial intrusion or a presence to be resisted or pushed aside
...
Accordingly, Litvin proposes a model that transcends
traditional postcolonial ‛simple binary negotiation between a coloniser’s “source” culture and the
“target” culture of the colonisedʼ and takes into account the interrelation between cultural localities,
sociopolitical contexts and intertextual resources, namely the ‛global kaleidoscopeʼ (p
...
” p95
"To reflect and express the eroded dream of pan-Arab unity once advocated by Nasser, Arab
writers sketched Hamlet as a political martyr, a revolutionary freedom fighter
...
Arab writers, inspired
by Hamlet’s tragedy and now viewing Sadat as Claudius and Nasser as King Hamlet, started a
wave of political satires to express their frustrations and hopelessness for political change
...
” p97

8: Holderness, Graham
...
" European Journal of English
Studies 12
...

"In reception the plays tend to be read as specimens of ‘counter-colonial’ discourse, where, in
Edward Said’s words, there is a ‘clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction
...
” p59
"Where the plays are performed in Arabic, they are accompanied with a translation, displayed in
projected on-screen surtitles, in the primary language of the audience
...
Al-Bassam describes part of this
process in terms of a linguistic ‘layering’: ‘The texts are written in English and then produced in
Arabic, undergoing a layered process of ‘‘arabization’’ and re- appropriation
...
” p60
"The English versions have been played in the Middle East, the Arabic in the West, and both to
mixed audiences of Arabic and English speakers
...
Part of
the meaning of the work lies in the relational interaction of different languages, in particular
between Anglo-American English and Arabic: two languages that tend to inscribe and articulate a
grammar of global conflict, a ‘clash of civilizations’, but are here put together with the aim of
reciprocal recognition and mutual understanding
...
” p61
"Hence Hamlet was reoriented to highlight social and political parallels
...
The young prince, struggling to define himself in a hostile
environment, suggests a disillusioned but resourceful younger generation, resistant to authority but
diffident about the possibilities of action
...
” p61
"To some extent Shakespeare was a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Al-Bassam, a cultural monument that
enabled him to smuggle critical views on his own society past the authorities and to the greedy
intelligences of the theatre audience
...
” p62
" For instance the play opens with the smart-suited delegates located in a modern political
assembly; but at the centre of the stage is the burial mound of Old Hamlet the assassinated King,
and the actors make formal ritual gestures towards it (laying stones on the grave)
...
”
p64
" The play is of course haunted by the ghost, the burial mound lying permanently at centre stage
as an unforgettable reminder of the past
...
This is the spectacle of characters who
realize too late their own ineffectiveness, their failure to engage with and change their world, their
fundamental lack of freedom
...
” p65
"The most substantial difference between The Arab League Hamlet and The Al-Hamlet Summit is
that in the latter Al-Bassam deviated from the Shakespearean text and produced a wholly new
script combining a much wider range of linguistic and theatrical registers
...
”
p66
"The Shakespearean dimension is there to provide a dramatic space in which contemporary
events can be re-projected with something like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, so that the present
condition is estranged rather than simply recognized: ‘Current political events – and our
perceptions of them – hang like a misty landscape, half-perceived, in the backdrop of the play’ (AlBassam, 2006: 25)
...
” p67
"This is Shakespeare ‘arabized’, refracted through an Islamic and Arabic sensibility
...
This can be seen, for instance, with Hamlet’s ‘‘Peace be
upon the Grave Dwellers monologue
...
The sense here of
Hamlet’s communion with the dead is quite different from Hamlet’s agonized and anxious
encounters with his father’s ghost, or the rancorous jesting of the Graveyard Scene in
Shakespeare’s play
...
” p68
"Ophelia’s final speech is similarly arabized and Islamicized:
OPHELIA: Are you recording? Can I start? In the Name of God The Bounteous, The Merciful
...

OPHELIA: The one who has turned me into a refugee has made a bomb of me
...

Here I am the animal that the world forgets,
I have try to speak language of man
But lying no good no change can make to it
Of injustice in life
I want people outside to know this
That I will express with with my body what is not
Able for to express politics and mighty nations
So I go to my God pure in my soul in my dignity I am pure
...
Her ‘madness’ includes the arrogation of religious authority by a woman,
and her vow of martyrdom (this is in effect a ‘video testament’)
...
She has been regarded as an ‘animal’;
deprived of human rights, ignored, neglected and abandoned
...
Finally words are put aside altogether: ‘I will express with my body what
is not/Able for to express politics and mighty nations
...
Compare
Al-Bassam’s Hamlet, who declares that ‘the time for the pen is past and we enter the era of the
sword’ (Al-Bassam, 2006: 82)
...
This Ophelia has all the insane clarity of a suicidal
martyr
...
” p69

10a: Litvin, Margaret
...
" Journal of Arabic Literature
38
...

“In four Arabic-language plays, a hypertrophied Claudius plainly allegorizes contemporary or recent
regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt
...
Recurrent animal imagery portrays him as literally a brute, lacking a conscience and
impervious to reason
...
Instead, Claudius' irresistible power
demonstrates the futility of political action (in the Aristotelian sense), including political theatre
...
Rather than a call for political awakening, then, these five
plays offer a dark meditation on the limits of politics
...
” p197
"Even the ghost Hamlet's father seems to tower over Claudius
...
8 The Ghost calls his killer "a wretch
whose natural gifts were poor/To those of mine"9?and other characters seem to agree
...
i
...
By contrast, Claudius
never raises a weapon and is easily embarrassed or "distempered" (III
...
293-5, see also IV
...

69-70)
...
ii) suggest he is anxious about filling his
brother's shoes; when he publicly admits that Fortinbras may hold "a weak supposal of our
worth" (I
...
18), one sus pects that Fortinbras has good reason
...
iv
...

And when Hamlet speaks of Claudius it is with a degree of contempt he usually reserves for
himself; his stepfather is a "damned villain" (I
...
106) but also a "king of shreds and patches" (III
...

103) and a "vice of kings": a buffoon (III
...
96-102)
...
) but, fundamentally, is a usurper with no legitimate claim
to the throne
...
But that is only because he is the puppet of
the play's real protean villain, one even more monstrous and mythical than those of the other
plays
...
” p202
"The second phase (1970-76) privileged an archetype whom I have termed the "Arab hero
Hamlet
...
They shifted their allegorical efforts to address audiences, not regimes
...
To this end directors turned Hamlet into an Arab revolu tionary hero, a fighter for
justice brutally martyred by an oppressive regime
...
”
p205
"To be clear: our post-1975 Arab playwrights are not among those Shake speare adapters who aim
to "write back" to Shakespeare's text or subvert its authority
...
" (82)” p216
"Ophelia dies as a suicide bomber, quoting Darwish's "Ramallah 2002" in her farewell video
...
Bush, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin
Laden and Ariel Sharon
...
The difference is that the villain this time is not Claudius' regime but that of militarized global
capitalism
...
The dealer sells Claudius and Fortinbras their tanks and rockets, Hamlet his
phos phorus bombs, and Ophelia her suicide belt
...
” p216
“
...
Yet rather
than being dissipated, his magical powers are transferred upstairs to his prayer's addressee?the
United States, global capitalism, oil interests, etc
...
The chameleon arms dealer is just a branch of the enterprise
...
The audacity of Al-Bassam's rewriting lies not in casting an Arab leader as
Claudius, but in casting the United States as God
...
“SIX PLAYS IN SEARCH OF A
PROTAGONIST, 1976–2002
...
142–182
...
(When he repudiates Ophelia it is for purely political reasons;
the Arabic-language rewrite adds back in some of the sexual innuendo absent from Al-Bassam’s
original
...
Nor does he have any trouble with words
...
The
Assembly shall hear my words: I, Hamlet, son of Hamlet, son of Hamlet am the rightful heir to this
nation’s throne
...

Our enemies compre- hend only the language of blood for this, the time for the pen has passed
and we enter the era of the sword
...
Let is be so and may God raise the profile of His martyrs!122”  p176
"As we have seen, at the imaginative center of post-1976 Arabic Hamlet plays there is often a selfserving and irresistible force, defined as “The Power” (al- sulta) and portrayed as protean and allconsuming
...
The play’s real Power, dwarfing even
Claudius, is mili- tarized global capitalism
...
” p177
"As we have seen, the unveiling of power in these plays has no revolutionary effect; on balance it
is politically conservative, reaffirming the all-powerful nature of the regime at the play’s center
...
In practice, until events took a
surprising turn in early 2011, the authoritarian regimes ruling the nations of these playwrights had
proven impossible for internal critics to reform or dislodge

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