wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

A new Arabic language production of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third has arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And as far as WNYC’s Karen Frillmann is concerned, it’s not a minute too soon. She spoke with the director backstage at BAM.

REPORTER: The corrupting influence of power – it’s hard to think of a time when a play with that theme isn't timely. Kuwaiti based director, Sulyman Bassam was looking for a project that could hold a mirror up to our current political climate, and he found it in Richard III.

BASSAM: What interested me most was the way the piece was the ways in which it portrayed a society - ways in which a society can be so swiftly hijacked by a group of powerful individuals.

REPORTER: Shakespeare wrote Richard III at a time when accession to the English throne was marked by intrigue, manipulation and violence. Bassam, who adapted the piece, thought the setting worked well as a window into the power dynamics of the world he hails from, the Arab gulf.

BASSAM: what we have is a society that has been brutalized by cycles of violence and cycles of revenge and blood letting and that cyclical aspect of history is interesting to me as well. And the dysfunctional family element—this idea of the contending allegiances of tribes and oligarchs was something that I felt was of particular significance.

REPORTER: It's squarely set in a contemporary royal court in the Arabian gulf. And, as it is in life — western figures, in the roles of Buckingham and Richmond appear in that court as players and power brokers.

Bassam has done what he calls a trans adaptation - working from the original text but adding a muiscal score, puting the piece in contemporary dialect and even changing metaphors as needed.

BASSAM: He's a merciful man that the adjective used and the murderer replies I'm as merciful as Snow in harvest. Snow in harvest is not something that is going to fit very easily into the world that we're portraying so we changed "snow in harvest" to "I merciful as rain on mud huts"

REPORTER: What's clear in this Arabic language performance is the emotional toll of violence—the cost to those who are in the path of those climbing to the top.

There are English supertitles that hang over the stage at the Harvey. But there's no need to translate the language of loss and brutality.

For WNYC, I’m Karen Frillmann

REPORTER: Richard the Third - an Arab tragedy, runs though tomorrow, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It’s part of the Muslim Voices, Arts & Ideas festival, which runs thrue June 14th.