The Bard of Basra

When fighting dictators and censorship, Arab directors have one playwright they can fall back on: Shakespeare. So says Kuwaiti writer and director, Sulayman Al-Bassam in The Guardian.

It is in this game of cat and mouse between theatre and the thought police that Shakespeare's texts come up trumps. The texts are dicey, metaphorical, slippery; they say and they don't say, they offend without offending, they are the perfect simulacra, the ultimate mask.