We see lots of domestic Hamlets, productions that ignore Fortinbras to focus on the fraught relationships within the royal household. The Al-Hamlet Summit is the opposite: a production that addresses the domestic questions only brusquely, concentrating instead on the play's sinister politics. This is the story of a ruler besieged by his family and his neighbouring countries, in which Hamlet's purpose is surprisingly unclear.
Adapted by Sulayman Al-Bassam, an Anglo-Kuwaiti writer, and transposed to the Middle East, The Al-Hamlet Summit is full of intriguing ideas that cloud and confuse the play. Hamlet becomes a religious extremist after discovering that his father was murdered; Laertes joins the army pushing Fortinbras's troops away from the country's border; Ophelia is a suicide bomber, scattering not flowers but intestines and blood. They all pose a threat to Claudius, a tyrant who speaks glibly of the "new democracy" then orders some townships to be burned.
The lack of specificity is a serious problem: we don't know what land we are in, where to place our sympathies. Neither the production nor the acting is sophisticated enough to communicate the critique of Middle Eastern politics - within Arabnations, between them and between east and west - that is intended. The result is an interpretation that shrouds the play, and the world in which it is set, in darkness.
Until August 26. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
