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.
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