The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan.
There seems no end to the uses to which the poor old hunchback villain can be put. Plainly he was in the running to be exposed sooner or later as Saddam Hussein. This was confessedly the first idea of Sulayman Al-Bassam in adapting the play for his Kuwaiti-based theatre company. But thankfully he saw that such a notion was too simplistic, and that it would be more fun to lean on Shakespeare’s tussle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians as a blueprint for the squabbles for dynastic succession in Arabian royal families.
Al-Bassam himself is the British-educated son of a Kuwaiti father and a British mother, scoring a success at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival with a version of Hamlet. In reimagining Richard III as ‘An Arab Tragedy’, he’s careful not to be seen tilting at any particular country or ruler, invoking only a generalised state in the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabic text, so far as you can tell from the surtitles, approximates to Shakespeare up to the point where the contemporaneous concerns of the show needs must take over. The Koran replaces all biblical references in the original, while the playing time is cut back to a continuous span of just under two hours.
The great surprise and pleasure is the banishment of the stereotypical Richard. Fayez Kazak’s Emir Gloucester sports no hump or lurching limp. He goes so far as to bemoan a face less handsome than Omar Sharif’s, but his murderous thoughts are camouflaged beneath a smiling presence of persuasive charm and wit.
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