S1: E2: ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ in Palestine

Season 1: “Sonnets in the Sands” - Arabic Shakespeare

In this episode, I discuss a 2011 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, by the Drama Academy at the Al-Qasaba theatre in Ramallah. Although a comedy and not a tragedy like last episode's play (Hamlet), the fraught political context in Palestine and the ongoing occupation led to unintended effects on the humour of the play. Join me as I break down the play's costuming, language, and directorship, and discuss wider concerns like Orientalism, or the recently ended ceasefire in Palestine. 

Transcript

Ahlan wa sahlan [welcome in Arabic] and welcome back to Global Shakespeare, the podcast exploring Shakespeare on world stages. 

I'm your host, Etta Selim, and in this season, Sonnets in the Sands,I will be guiding you through the intersections of Shakespeare and Arabic theatre. 

So sit back, relax, and let me tell you the story of Shakespeare's enchanted forest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Hi everyone, it's been a while. My last episode was recorded in June and at the time of recording it is March. 

How are you? I hope you're all well. I have had a very busy time. I'm currently on a study placement in Córdoba, or as the Arab settlers in the Middle Ages called it, Qurtuba, in the south of Spain, Andalusia, for those who do not know. 

I had to move over there, and I've been studying lots of Arabic-related things just to keep the ball rolling. 

I have actually started learning Arabic, which has been a very beautiful but painful process, I'll say. 

I feel more connected to my Egyptian roots than ever and through my studies I've been able to pursue those interests as much as possible. 

In the interim, with a lot of things to study and lots of deadlines, lots of traveling, I've been thinking a lot about how to make this episode. 

So to recap, last time we explored Egyptian adaptations of Hamlet. We looked at how directors and playwrights have reshaped the tragedy to reflect Egypt's political history. From revolutionary interpretations to debates and power and fate, we saw how Hamlet has become a tool for social commentary in the Arab world. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I highly recommend going back and checking it out. But without further ado, let's move on to today. 

Today we're diving into A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a very different Shakespeare play than our last episode and also a very different political and cultural environment in Palestinian theatre. So how has this play, often described as whimsical or otherworldly, been adapted and reimagined within the Palestinian cultural and political landscape? What does Shakespeare's enchanted forest look like when set against the realities of occupation and resistance? What are the consequences of introducing Shakespeare into Palestine? Stay with me as we explore these questions and more. 

In the first place, it's important to summarise the play for those of you who haven't read Shakespeare's text. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a complex play full of constantly changing relationships between the characters. I, for one, get very confused when a lot of new names are introduced to me, so I'll do my best to summarise it as cohesively as possible. The play is set in Athens. There are a few pairings that I want you to think about. You have Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and his wife Hippolyta, who is Queen of the Amazons. They're going to get married and so they're planning a lavish celebration and they've asked for some actors to perform a play for them. 

Meanwhile, a civilian named Egeus, one of Theseus and Hippolytus courtiers, has come to court to complain about his daughter Hermia. Hermia is in love with Lysander, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. However, Hermia's friend Helena is in love with Demetrius. He has previously sworn his undying love for her, but his affections seem to have changed and he is now in love with Hermia. 

So we have Lysander and Demetrius, both in love with Hermia, even though Hermia only loves Lysander. And then we have Helena, who is in love with Demetrius, even though he does not love her back. 

Egeus brings Hermia, as well as Demetrius and Lysander to court to complain to the king and make him force Hermia to marry Demetrius at his behest or to kill her. Theseus orders Hermia to follow her father's instructions. 

However, Lysander, once everyone has left, asks Hermia to run away with him from Athens. The lovers agree to run away to the forest that night, and when Helena comes to talk to Hermia and complain about Demetrius’ lack of affection for her, Hermia and Lysander confide in her, telling her of their plan to run away to the forest. Helena, however, decides to tell Demetrius of their plan, hoping to win his affection. That night, all four lovers set out into the forest. 

Meanwhile, a group of Athenian tradesmen known as the Mechanicals, led by a man named Peter Quince, are planning to perform a play in celebration of the Duke's wedding. They rehearse the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in the same forest. 

Elsewhere in the forest, another important couple, the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania argue over Titania's refusal to give up her page boy to Oberon. The page boy is a character that I will talk about a lot, and he doesn't have any dialogue, but forms an important plot crux. 

Oberon sends his servant Puck to cast a spell on Titania that will make her fall in love with whatever creature she sees first when she wakes up. Puck finds a plant that will achieve this effect, and Oberon uses this on Titania as she sleeps. 

Puck, meanwhile, overhears the tradesman rehearsing and magically transforms the lead actor Bottom's head his name is Bottom, into that of a donkey. The other men are terrified and leave the forest. When Titania wakes, the first creature she sees is Bottom, and she falls rapturously in love with him. 

Meanwhile, Helena chases Demetrius into the forest and their fighting disturbs Oberon. He sees that Helena is being mistreated by Demetrius. He tells Puck to use the same magic on Demetrius too, that he will fall in love with Helena. However, Puck muddles up the two Athenian men, Demetrius and Lysander, and uses it on Lysander instead, which makes him fall in love with Helena. 

So now we have a rather confusing situation, the reverse of how the play opened. Whereas before, both Demetrius and Lysander were in with Hermia, now they are both seemingly in love with Helena, Hermia is now scorned, just as Helena once was. 

Eventually, Oberon lifts all the enchantments and puts the humans to sleep. When Titania wakes up, she's horrified that she's been in love with a donkey and reconciles with Oberon. When the lovers awake in the forest, they decide that the night must have just been a dream. Lysander and Hermia are back to being in love and Demetrius admits he loves Helena after all. Theseus and Hippolyta finally get married, but this becomes a triple celebration as the other human couples marry too. 

Quince and Bottom perform their play with the tradesmen. At the end of the play, the couples leave and Oberon, Titania and the fairies perform a blessing. Puck asks the audience to applaud if they enjoyed the performance. 

In this episode, I will be addressing a 2011 production by Al Qasaba Theatre in Ramallah. 

This production was the result of international collaboration between Folkwang University for Music, Theatre and Dance in Essen, Germany, and the Al Qasaba Theatre in Ramallah. 

These two universities and organisations originally collaborated to create an Academy for the Theatre Arts and offer a BA in theatre. 

But as part of this specific collaboration, the production of Midsummer Night's Dream premiered as a work in progress in Palestine, before touring to Essen, Germany, where it was presented as part of an intercultural Shakespeare festival organised by Folkwang University. 

Now, in the first place, it's important to talk about how this partnership should be celebrated, since it provided important opportunities to Palestinians. 

However, the director of the play, Samer Al-Sabr, wrote about his wariness and emphasised the need to bring critical attention to, in his words, the kind of transactions underscoring such a partnership, particularly given the perceived civilising missions of Western campuses in the Middle East. 

The reason I chose this particular production is that Samer Al-Sabr published his production notes and also wrote an article comparing this production with another of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palestine. 

Going into depth about his process, I also found another article by Rand T. Hazou, a Palestinian theatre practitioner and scholar who, in 2011, was participating in an internship at the Al Qasaba Theatre. He detailed his thoughts and highlighted some of the unintended consequences of bringing Shakespeare into an occupied state. 

First, I'd like to talk about the making and rehearsal of the play and why this is important. What were the formal structures underlying the play? How was this play set up? In what way was it ordered? 

Now, in terms of language, the play was first translated into Amiyah, Palestinian colloquial language. Samer Al-Sabr then retranslated the play using literary Arabic, or fusha as it's known. 

This is important to talk about because there is still a perception in Arabic-speaking countries that dialect is not an elevated mode. The vernacular has lower connotations. It's spoken amongst the working class and often the official languages, the more respected languages for documentation for universities, specifically in countries that were former colonies such as Morocco or Algeria, are French or English, the colonising languages. And even if this isn't the case, the respected literature would be in Fusha, which isn't the spoken language. 

Rand T. Hazou frequently notices that the Palestinian production was completely devoid of Shakespearean language, and this translation is an act that takes it further away from Shakespeare, that takes it so far that can it even be recognized as the same? 

So to what extent is it still Shakespeare? James Bulman argues that translation is a key postcolonial strategy that in his words, subverts the authority of Shakespeare's text. Now, Bulman also comments on a common feature underscoring Shakespearean productions, the idea that the actor is just a conduit, a vessel for Shakespeare's voice, and he argues that these approaches are dangerous. They continue harbouring a belief that there is inherent meaning in his text, which productions should try to discover that Shakespeare can speak for himself with transcultural authority, as he says.

How else was this play adapted to Palestine? The costuming itself was specifically Palestinian in style. Egeus opened the play in traditional patriarchal costume, wearing a black abaya, which is a robe, and his daughter was dressed in modern trousers and shirt. The Mechanicals spoke in street vernacular and behaved like Palestinian tradesmen. This was based on the actors’ experience of growing up in working-class families and research that they did in nearby markets in Ramallah. In Act 5, the mechanicals also alluded to local politics when Tom Snout played the wall wearing a Jalabiya [a traditional robe associated with the countryside/rural farmers] printed with the image of the Israeli wall near the Qalandiyah checkpoint. In keeping with Palestinian spirit, a dabke dance closed the play's final wedding celebration. 

What's important to note is a response to this production that Rand T. Hazou noted, which was that, in his words, there was an absence of any attempt to explore Shakespeare's text by examining the cultural, historical or social context out of which it emerged. Workshops were given by the German University about the Shakespearean play, giving some background. And yet the Palestinian theatre didn't make recourse to European theatre history or the English origins of the play in the 16th century. 

Now, the way he phrases this in this article appears to be a reprimand, but it's worth noting as something important. Considering this within the framework of an international theatre festival, the focus on Palestinian experience and culture is very important, rooting the production and lived experience. Samer Al-Sabr was very keen to focus on the actors themselves and their experiences, and his coaching and directing took rather an unorthodox approach. As a result of this, one of the rehearsal exercises was called Palestinian Moments, where the actors created a series of frozen tableaux from Palestinian streets. These moments became the foundation for the characters of the Mechanicals and the artisans in the play. 

Al-Sabr describes the rehearsals as a decolonised, democratic creative space, since the actors had equal creative input over rehearsals. The actors cast themselves, in fact, deciding amongst themselves who would be best suited to which role, picking the roles that they could identify with most. In one instance, two actors playing Demetrius and Peter Quince decided to exchange roles and Al-Sabr supported their decision. 

Some of you might be thinking, how on earth did he direct this group of actors if they were left to their own devices and given equal creative control? Samer Al-Sabr himself notes the chaotic nature of the rehearsals. In his words, he says the rehearsal process proceeded from a state of chaos and disarray to a production concept that emerged from the actors' understanding of the play and their Palestinian locale. 

The play as a result, inherently has a hybrid aesthetic. Al-Sabr describes the mixture of the inescapable English origins of the play, Palestinian moments, a Shakespearean plot, found objects and the bodies of Palestinian youth constantly between the outside occupation and the inside freedoms within the academy. 

Here Al-Sabr raises an important point that echoes throughout both articles. Within the theatre. Al Sabur and Rand T. Hazou were very aware of how the outside lives of the actors heavily impacted their acting and formed a complete contrast to the freedoms of creative expression which they were encouraged to explore within the theatre. 

Outside, the actors contended with the realities of the occupation, such as political uncertainty, limited freedom of movement, financial difficulties, their families, disapproval of theatre education, government dysfunction and what Al Sabur calls an overall irrational existence. 

Inside, they could explore personal and professional liberation. Al Sabur describes daily physical exercises in voice and movement, open discussions on issues of equality, creative self explorations, freedom of interpersonal relationships and studies of foreign plays and aesthetics. 

This conflict between inner and outer, between the realities of the occupation and the strange freedom experienced in the theatre, led to unknowing tensions being created within the theatre and within the production itself. Apparently this conflict led to unhealthy competition between the actors, with each one striving to be the best possible. 

I think it's important to note the scene I've mentioned with the mechanicals and the overt reference to the Israeli wall. Hazou suggests that this explicit reference to the separation wall might have eclipsed the actor's ability to find the humour of this scene, concluding that here perhaps is an example of how the introduction of Palestinian cultural specificity may have worked to overburden Shakespeare's play and create unexpected consequences. 

Hazou describes this failure of humour as inherently linked to stigma around menial labour within Palestinian society. In Shakespeare's play, Egeus describes the men who have been rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe as ‘hard-handed men that worked in Athens here,/ which never laboured in their minds till now’ [Act I, Scene 5]. Lots of critics agree that these comments heavily rely on the distinction between manual labour and intellectual labour. This was linked implicitly to ideologies of social status in medieval and early modern England. To quote directly from her, a Shakespeare critic, Patricia Parker, contends that “as a term synonymous with the mean vulgar and unlettered, the mechanical was associated with the material as something placed at the bottom of a hierarchy to be governed or ruled”. 

These associations with menial labour remained in the Al Qasaba Theatre production. The term ‘Mechanicals’ was translated into Arabic as umal, which literally means workers, but most often within Palestine connotes manual labour and class distinctions that align with the meaning of Shakespeare's text. 

In a 2014 article on a Middle east media site, Al Monitor, Jihan Abdallah explores the fraught contradiction of Palestinians working in Israeli settlements. The West Bank at that point suffered from a 23% unemployment rate; over 20,000 Palestinians were employed in Israeli settlements, with thousands more working without permits. 

The ironic consequence of the occupation is that Palestinians are mainly employed in unskilled or low-skilled jobs in Israel, where the wages are at least 70% higher than the average wage in the West Bank. Abdullah argues that Palestinians are constantly aware of the reality that Palestinian labour in Jewish settlements at once cements the Israeli occupation and helps feed Palestinian families. Although some Palestinians would view working in Israeli settlements as a practical necessity, others would condemn this employment as complicity that contributes to the ongoing Israeli occupation. 

The cast of the drama academy at Al Qasaba Theatre remained constantly aware of the widespread unemployment in Palestine and the harsh, exploitative working conditions many faced when seeking employment in Israel. The choreographer Petra Barghouthi suggested that at least two of the Palestinian caste had secured work in the past as labourers on Israeli settlements, which may have significantly impacted their ability to identify with the humour of the characters they were portraying. 

Hazou concludes that the stigma surrounding work in Palestine may have frustrated the cast's attempts to engage with the Mechanical characters of Shakespeare's text. 

The director and the cast were explicitly aware of these tensions, and the director was very adamant that these should be expressed. One key aspect to discuss is the character of the Indian Boy, which was kept in the Palestinian production but usually left out of English ones. 

The Indian boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream is someone the fairy queen Titania has taken as her attendant. This sparks King Oberon's jealousy and becomes the catalyst for the rivalry between the fairy royals. Although referenced in the play, the Indian boy does not normally appear in productions. He has no lines and functions merely as a prop to create dramatic tension during Oberon and Titania's first meeting. In the play, the postcolonial theorist Shankar Raman describes the Indian boy's simultaneous presence and absence in the play as “an erasure of colonial subjectivity and race”. In his words, this reflects “the historical difficulty in the 16th century of conceiving the ethnic Other except as the filled space of Western imperialist desire”. 

Another very important postcolonial critic, Ania Loomba, suggests that the struggle between Titania and Oberon over the Indian Boy can be read as “a reference to the early phase of English imperialist expansion, with the child designated as a prized colonial commodity”. 

Samer Al-Sabr chose to maintain this Orientalist figure in his play. 

For those of you who don't know, Edward Said's text, Orientalism, is a seminal text in postcolonial studies. It, in fact, sparked an entire wave of Postcolonial criticism. It's a way of analysing the ways in which the other, the Oriental, which is an umbrella term for all the countries essentially that do not come under the Western European umbrella, is perceived in literature and art throughout history. This relationship is often one of looking, of observing the cultures that are perceived as other are for visual consumption in the arts by Western culture. They are perceived as exotic, as magical, as otherworldly. These values serve to make other cultures objects of fantasy and objects of consumption. 

But what does this exoticisation of actual living people with daily lives, with jobs, with families, do to separate them from their reality? What this does is inevitably make them into fiction, make people into fiction, make their history into magic, into folklore. And you're given an excuse to treat them as inferior. You're given an excuse to go and colonize them in the name of railroads, in the name of schools, in the name of civilizing the people, when really all you're doing is taking over. These are the foundations of Orientalism. Of course, it goes much further than that. But let's go back to what I said about visual.

It is somewhat surprising that Samer Al-Sabr, a Palestinian director who referenced Orientalism a lot in his article, actually chose to include this Orientalist character. The boy, played by 23-year-old Jihad Al-Khatib, was wearing a green loincloth around his waist and purple material wrapped around his head in the shape of a turban. In his scene, he wanders forlornly onto the stage to sit or stand dejectedly as commanded by his fairy queen. Now, during rehearsals, Al Sabur paused to give notes to the actors and to compliment Jihad on his acting. Jihad looked confused and confessed, “I don't really know what I'm doing. I feel lost.” To which Samer Al-Sabr responded, “this is exactly what we want. Please keep doing exactly the same thing.”

At a first glance, the inclusion of the Indian boy might seem to reaffirm the Orientalism with which this character was designed. However, Hazou notes that this character might be a loaded response to a strong feeling of resentment among the Palestinian caste to a perceived imperialist agenda in being made to engage with Shakespeare as part of the intercultural project with Folkvang. 

The festival would feature five productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, presented by the international partners of the project, which included Folkvang University and the Drama Academy in Ramallah, but also included Columbia University in the United States, the Shanghai Theatre Academy and Romania's Lucia Blaga University. The festival would involve each of the participating universities or groups performing their own productions over a two-week period before culminating in a joint trans-cultural production which would have scenes featuring all the actors from each of the participating institutions and in which, quote-unquote, “all language barriers are dropped.”

The critic Patrisse Pavis describes transcultural theatre as “theatre which transcends particular cultures on behalf of the universality of the human condition.”

Transcultural theatre attempts to surpass or override any specific cultural codes, behaviours or realities in order to reach a universal human condition. 

The critic Baruch contends that the transcultural also involves, quote-unquote, “distance from, if not resistance to, the realities of history, political struggle and above all, nationalism”, and expresses discomfort with the “apolitical, asocial and subtly orientalist premise underlying this form of cross-cultural performance”. 

The anxieties of the Palestinian cast about the International Shakespeare Festival and the underlying impetus towards the universality of human experience are therefore justified. Universality and transcultural performance threaten to ignore the realities of Palestinian life and struggle. As such, the director's choice was perhaps a way to comment on the continuing invisibility of the Palestinian narrative and experience. 

Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar and the author of Orientalism, describes in his essay The Question of Palestine “an entrenched cultural attitude towards Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs and the Orient. This attitude inspired Zionist views that dehumanised Palestinians.” And invisibility of Palestinian experience is all too familiar. 

Take, for example, their invisibility in the media. A study by the Center for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters and 25,515 news articles from over 28 UK online media websites from October 7th 2023 to November 7th in the wake of the recent Palestinian uprising. Their report discusses the erasure of the Palestinian people and their narrative contempt for historical context, failure to question Israeli sources and claims, use of emotive language, identifying with Israelis while dehumanizing Palestinians and misrepresentation of pro-Palestinian protesters as anti-Semitic, violent or pro-Hamas. You will find this if you go to any news source that you can think of, even the ones that are more left-wing. 

Israeli people are slaughtered, victims of massacres and atrocities, whereas Palestinian men, women and children are found dead or die as if their deaths are not at the hands of Israeli troops. 

Terms such as ‘atrocity’ and ‘slaughter’ were found to be 70% more likely to be applied to Israeli deaths. 76% of online articles framed the conflict as an Israel-Hamas war, while only 24% mentioned Palestine or Palestine. These statistics show the huge tendency to deny Palestinian identity. 

I would really recommend reading Edward Said's The Question of Palestine as it is a fundamental read to anyone wishing to understand a bit better the history and the cultural experience of the Palestinian people. What shocked me is how this book is just as pertinent today as it was on its first publication in 1979. He says: 

“Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric of outrage used in reporting Arab terror against Israeli civilians or towns and villages, and the rhetoric of neutrality employed to describe Israeli attacks against Palestinian positions by which no one could know that Palestinian refugee camps in south Lebanon are being named?”

Now, back to the Indian Boy, as a symbol of the invisibility of the Palestinian narrative and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against occupation. This character serves not only to highlight the Orientalist themes in Shakespeare's text but also a subtle challenge to the perceived cultural imperialism of the larger intercultural project instigated by Folkwang University. The choice to situate the Indian boy as Other perhaps demonstrates a wish to underscore the privileged position of the Western theatres and audiences in Germany. 

During the Drama Academy partnership between Al Qasaba Theatre and Folkwang, German students had the opportunity to come to Palestine and vice versa. The Palestinian students appreciated basic freedoms taken for granted in Germany, such as the ability to drive for several hours without seeing a checkpoint or the ability to travel long distances within Germany without having to carry identity cards. In contrast, on their visit to Palestine, German students were shocked at the limitations of Palestinian everyday life, the inability to travel freely, or the need to adapt to local norms. Most importantly, the German students saw the extent of the personal sacrifice that Palestinians endured in order to study and produce theatre. 

Now in Germany, where Shakespeare is already transplanted from his English origins and is seen as more of an international set of texts for production and adaptation, it's still important to emphasize how a transcultural performance risk risks erasing or eclipsing culturally specific yet all-encompassing struggles like life under occupation. 

Which aspects of culture do you keep and which do you erase? How can you achieve neutrality when to make something neutral strips an entire people of their real lived experiences? 

There is an entire politics of watching when it comes to Orientalism. Postcolonial theatre scholars, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins emphasized the imperial gaze inherent to watching theatre. These two critics note that this gaze allows the audience to watch over others, which, they point out, is “precisely what characterises looking relations between the coloniser and the colonised”, by placing other bodies, placing ethnic bodies on a Western stage. 

Specifically, what you are doing is participating in the very dynamic of watching that is the fundamental of Orientalism, of imperialism, going back to the Indian boy. The culturally distinct body is often designed to be overlooked on stage in two senses, and I'll quote them directly here, “to be examined more fully than other signifiers as an object of curiosity and to be rendered invisible as an object of disregard”. 

Samer Al-Sabr's choice to put the figure of the Orientalized Indian boy on stage is certainly a political one. He is writing back to the long tradition of observing with intent to consume and highlighting the uncomfortable politics behind this to alert audiences to this authoritarian gaze by making the parameters of watching apparent and exposing how imperialism denies colonial subjects their humanity. 

In his director's note, Al-Sabr emphatically declares that Shakespeare's work is not universal and goes on to explain the rationale behind his approach to staging Shakespeare's text. The starting point for this production is a group of Palestinian acting students in a nation under occupation. He says: “How do the restrictions of the requirements of a festival, the foreign names and ideas in the story, the conceptually Western play and the harsh realities of Palestine intersect on the stage in front of the audience? Should we stop ourselves from being lost in the fantasy, or must we embrace it?”

Al Sabr is adamant that using Shakespeare provided more fertile ground for adaptation and openness than using local playwrights would. And in fact, he does something more radical by describing Shakespeare as a common open-source text, which changes entirely based on the needs of the production. 

I think that's a really lovely way of looking at Shakespeare. In fact, every production of Shakespeare, of which there are many, every single year in many different countries, changes the text, uses it as a basis for a new production, new words, new costuming, new staging. And it's important to note how, although within academia, there is still so much focus on rooting your academic research in Shakespeare himself, in his inherent value in his Englishness, there is a long tradition of adapting, editing and co-opting Shakespeare's play, in Samer Al-Sabr's words, “established on the Western stage and emulated on world stages.” The idea of an open source text allows room for lots of adaptation and interpretation. 

Samer Al-Sabr believes in the artistic power of his actors. He is insistent upon the openness of Shakespeare, which can be adapted as much or as little as a director wants. In his production, he says that Shakespeare can be performed without being a vehicle for writing back to the Empire, and without being an ideological export from, in his words, an overbearing colonial master. Productions of Shakespeare on world stages are not predetermined by a colonial legacy. 

I would like to posit a different question. When we place certain expectations on Palestinian theatre of writing back to English colonialism, of homogenizing themselves into a culture that can be consumed, what do we do? What expectations, what pressures are we placing upon creative culture? What pressures are we placing upon Palestinian people themselves? I would like to note another Palestinian production of Richard III, this time by Ashtar Theatre in Palestine. This production was run as part of the Globe's International Shakespeare Festival. One of the critics who wrote about this production said that at one point a fellow academic in the crowd said, well, what's specifically Palestinian about this? This is a global Shakespeare festival. Shouldn't they be saying something culturally specific? 

If Samer Al-Sabr had done a quote, unquote, “faithful” production of Shakespeare with powerful acting, dialogue and directorial choices, which are not specifically Palestinian to a Western audience, would that have made it any less valid or Palestinian a production? No. Sometimes I wonder whether expecting cultural values, also aligns with Orientalism. 

However, Rand T. Hazou’s article ends differently. His whole article is called Dreaming of Shakespeare and each paragraph is given its own title. Dreaming of work. Dreaming of Freedom. His conclusion is that perhaps it is better not to dream of Shakespeare in Palestine. 

It is difficult to dream when living in a nightmare. But it is also important to respond to the injustices of the Israeli occupation and speak truthfully about the Palestinian reality. In the last episode, I talked about the Nahda, the renaissance, the reawakening of Arab nations to unify and free themselves from occupation. Hazou’s conclusion harks back to that. Dreaming of freedom is one thing, but if one is dreaming, one is also sleeping. 

Linking Shakespeare and sleep in a place in the Arab world that is so loaded with notions of wakefulness, the Nahda, where sleep is synonymous with lack of awareness and an inability to engage with political truths, is a powerful and resounding statement. He argues that it is better not to engage with Shakespeare if this resembles sleep. 

Perhaps in this view, much like the Hamlet adaptations that I spoke about in the last episode, theatre is not capable of inspiring large-level change. The realities of the occupation still persist. Palestinian students who experienced creative freedom within the theatre still had to go home to their outside life, life where their experience is fraught and complex. 

Opportunity is essential. But some of you may be wondering, what is the point? If the outside circumstances of the occupation do not change, then what is freedom worth within a theatre, if outside of a theatre, freedom is a dream? As someone half Egyptian, I am all too familiar with the sense of futility within Arab politics, a sense that things cannot improve, that the cycle will always continue. In Palestine, the genocide and ongoing occupation are potent reminders that history can, in fact, repeat itself. 

Edward Said's The Question of Palestine was a shocking read. Events that happened in the 70s, events that happened in the 90s have once again repeated themselves and the world is seemingly no more aware. 

At the time of recording, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Palestine has just been shattered. Israeli strikes have once again targeted Gaza and more than 400 people are dead. As usual, these strikes are carried out in the name of killing high ranking Hamas officials. But the real consequence is the genocide of thousands more people. 

A temporary ceasefire cannot hold if we do not keep pressuring, keep bringing attention to the atrocities committed. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel guilty of committing war crimes, a verdict that has made no meaningful change. In this report they bring attention to the many war crimes committed by Israel: targeting hospitals, civilian infrastructure, stopping aid from passing through. Even before this morning, with more airstrikes, Israel at the time of Ramadan, the holy month, blocked aid supplies getting into Gaza. Any truce is temporary by nature. To reach lasting peace, the international community must step up and hold Israel accountable for their atrocities. 

Israel would have you believe that there will be no change, that things cannot change. Social media has been once again a weapon of misinformation, of false propaganda spread by the Israeli government. But it has also been a place where Palestinians can share their real lived experiences. 

Thousands of people go to the streets to protest. Thousands receive ramifications for this, but the word is spreading. 

Arabic theatre might have us ask what good is dreaming if we are still asleep? However, these productions emphasis on Palestinian culture, on Palestinian lives and histories and experiences is inspiring. Theatre is a vehicle for making themselves visible. 

I would urge you all to participate as best as you can. If your city has protests for Palestine, go to them as much as you're able. If you can, donate some money, donate as much as you can spare, Raise awareness, talk to your friends, talk to people, question opinions that are being presented as mainstream. 

I cannot summarise an entire nation's fight for freedom encompassing thousands of years in a single podcast episode. But what I can do is highlight some of the key points of tension and encourage you all to act where you are able. 

Dreams can be passive, can be forgotten, but we cannot let them get forgotten. 

Shukran jazeelan [‘thank you very much’ in Arabic] everyone. Thank you for listening. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you liked today's episode. Consider giving the podcast a follow or sharing it with your friends. 

I'd like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Varsha Panjwani, who has been mentoring me for this podcast process. I really appreciate all of your advice and tips, and our meetings have been a source of real reassurance for me. 

Thank you all again and see you next time.