I FOUND OUT only last year that there are several modern Arab adaptations of Hamlet. I am only familiar with this one and with Forget Hamlet by Jawad al-Assadi, and they differed in a interesting way. They both set the play in contemporary circumstances (as a good many productions of the original do these days), and both use Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia as representing the options and potentialities of the younger generation (which is also a pervasive theme in the original, I would say).
Al-Assadi makes Laertes more assertive and more militant than Hamlet, an intellectual who shies away from commitment and action. This works reasonably well—Hamlet is famous for his dithering and indecisiveness, after all. What interested me is that al-Bassam does it just the other way around. In The Al-Hamlet Summit, Hamlet is the one calling out and standing up to the corruptions of the compromised older generation, and Laertes has been co-opted into serving the interests of the powerful. This works well, too—works better, maybe. Laertes, for all his heat and momentum, lets himself be turned into Claudius’s agent. He’s a nobler, more sympathetic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, someone who succumbed to power’s promises.
Definitely worth a look, and a useful reminder of what a fertile imaginative seedbed Shakespeare’s play has been.
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