Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al Hamlet Summit: normalisation and Arab treacherous politics

ABSTRACT Al-Bassam’s The Al Hamlet Summit (2006), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), presents a cynical comment on the political corruption in the Arab World and it constitutes from a presentist perspective, we argue, an anachronistic critique of some Arab leaders’ lapse into normalisation with the long-standing Other, the Israeli occupation. Al-Bassam captures the political corruption and Arab leaders’ liaison with Israel through the figure of Claudius, who, like Arab leaders, normalises relations with the enemies of his nation, Fortinbras and the Arms Dealer. Many Arab leaders are normalising relations with Israel as a defensive mechanism against their citizens who have been protesting against dictatorial and tyrannical regimes that have conceived rottenness and corruption in the political and spiritual foundations of the states. While the waves of normalisation that have plagued the contemporary Arab scene raise the spectre of Western hegemony over Arabs, being channelled by the Trump Administration, many Arab leaders hurl to the strategy of normalisation ‘pants down’ so as to curb their citizens prospective revolutionary acts.