Agency, staging and representation strategies in Sulayman Al Bassam’s the speaker’s progress

Andrea Peghinelli Agency, Staging and Representation Strategies in Sulayman Al Bassam’s The Speaker’s Progress Abstract: Sulayman Al Bassam wrote in 2011 The Speaker’s Progress, an appropriation of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, as the third play of his Arab Shakespeare Trilogy. The urgency of making Twelfth Night into a story of secularism and religious tolerance – rewriting thus the agenda of the play with a different authorial voice – was dictated by Al Bassam’s perception of the issues and concerns of the post 9/11 Arab World. Through an analysis of the text, and with references to the performance staged in Boston’s Paramount Theatre, the article shows how this peculiar appropriation is the mixed result of interpretive histories of texts and of the interpreter’s culture. As a matter of fact, the contemporary appropriation of Twelfth Night is represented on stage as the reconstruction of a 1963 performance of a liberal adaptation from a supposed Arab Golden Age. The screening of fragments of that past production provides a cue for the performers on stage to create a dialogue, in a metatheatrical doubling of the narration, between two completely different worlds, the past on film and the present of the contemporary Arab scene as it is interpreted by Al Bassam.