Have ghost, will travel

A disturbed young man sees a ghost, who tells him he has been usurped. He will take no counsel, his girlfriend sees no exit. He stages a theatrical showdown with the usurpers, designed to bring out the forensic truth but which ends up with a bloodbath, him dead and a new young ruler.

Yes, of course, it’s Hamlet. But if your mind drifted to a certain local difficulty, that has less to do with any cleverness on my part and more with the archetypal nature of Shakespeare’s plot.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been one of the touchstones of anthropologists and others interested in exploring universal aspects of experience. The experience of a young man, haunted by the thought of being cheated of his birthright, with deeply ambivalent feelings towards those closest to him: How far can this travel?

In the 1950s, among the Tiv of Nigeria, the anthropologist Laura Bohannan found a poor view of Hamlet, given that the Tiv considered it a duty for a man to marry his brother’s widow, as Hamlet’s uncle did. They thought that either Ms Bohannan had misunderstood the story or that Hamlet was a mixed-up young man with no sense of seniority or circumspection.

In the former Soviet Union and communist Europe, it was different. There rich political re-readings of Hamlet and other plays were staged. Shakespeare was, in the words of the Polish director, Jan Kott, “our contemporary”. The ghost, the usurpation, the youth rendered impotent by politics and authoritarianism, were all too real.

And on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution, it is worth asking what can Arab responses to Hamlet tell us about the longer cultural roots of the Arab Spring and where it might lead?

Guiding my question is the recent book by Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey (Princeton), in press as the Arab uprisings got underway but perhaps all the better for that. There are no strained attempts at immediate relevance and it is easier to see the longer shadows thrown by the events.

Many essential ingredients are there for the reception to be creative and interesting, for the signature scenes and language of the play to find deep resonance. Even prior to independence, the various Arab peoples have been disturbed by an acute sense of things being “out of joint”, the political hopes of youth frustrated by a bankrupt – and bankrupting – older generation.

Indeed, Hamlet has had a stellar if sometimes disconcerting career on the Arab stage. An operetta hero, a nationalist revolutionary, a dissident, his existential “to be or not to be” speech has led him to be liberalised, nationalised, Arabised and Islamised.

The boundaries between theatre and the real political world have been permeable. It is not just that Hamlet has been cited by political activists and staged by directors wanting to comment on their country’s predicament. Ms Litvin argues persuasively that the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser (1918-1970), who was intoxicating as a youthful Julius Caesar on stage, today plays the role of Hamlet’s ghost in Arab political imagination.

However, because Hamlet has been all these things, it’s useful to keep certain things clear.

First, it has not been an English Shakespeare but global culture’s Shakespeare that has travelled to and within the Arab world. Some of the first 19th-century stagings were from French translations or, rather, adaptations, such as that by Alexandre Dumas who gave Hamlet a happy ending (!) and made him out to be a second Count of Monte Cristo.

Opera was an important mediator, too, as was film. There were times, in the mid-20th century, when there were three Hamlets to be seen in Cairo at the same time: the films by Laurence Olivier and Grigori Kozinstev and an Egyptian production, which was criticised for not doing enough to give an original “Egyptian” reading.

Second, the “naturalisation” of Hamlet – in countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria, Kuwait and Jordan – was conditioned directly by Soviet and Eastern European readings. The Hamlet that emerged was born to be an Arab revolutionary – too much, in fact. He was eventually tamed to become a regime propagandist in a country such as Syria.

Third, in a late phase, Hamlet has tended to turn up obliquely, as both contemporary theatre developed and the political situation decayed. As the revolutionary action of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to inaction, paralysis and self-disgust, there has been a proliferation of avant-garde plays about Hamlet but without him or else updates to fit the contemporary scene (as when the morally fastidious Hamlet, having a coffee with Ophelia at a fashionable Cairo cafe, exclaims not “get thee to a nunnery” but “how can I date someone with 500 friends on Facebook?”).

All very interesting but does it tell us anything about the current grave events in the Arab world beyond an interesting history of Shakespearean theatre and entertainment? I think it does.

Whether you’re going to produce Hamlet cynically, for laughs, merely cleverly or meditatively, you need to find a congruent fit (or challenge) for your audience’s ideas about youth, its ghosts and renewal. The career of Hamlet’s ghost, by yoking together ideas of political order with the nightmare on the brains of youth, always tells us more about a political culture than it actually says.

ranierfsadni@europe.com