Shakespeare in Kabul by Stephen Landrigan, Qais Akbar Omar (review)

Shakespeare in Kabul is Stephen Landrigran and Qais Akbar Omar’s fascinating chronicle of what may be the first professional production of a Shakespeare play in Afghanistan, a country with a fractured theatre history that includes virtually no Shakespeare. The book is an account of what happened when the Paris-based actress Corinne Jaber directed a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Kabul in 2005 using local talent, working with a small budget, in conjunction with an Afghan arts program. It focuses on the men and women of Kabul who became members of the cast. As the writers say in their preface, “This is their story” (ix).

The book is divided into three parts, “Exposition,” “Climax,” and “Resolution,” with first part written by Landrigan, a playwright and former journalist who in 2005 was working in the Kabul offices of a U.S.-funded education program. The setting is a war-ravaged Kabul during what would prove to be a brief time of peace and hope, when “everyone saw good things ahead” (5). Landrigan describes choosing and adapting the play (which he did with Jaber), finding a Farsi translation that could be put into Dari (one of Afghanistan’s main languages), raising $30,000 to cover production costs, obtaining official sponsorship from the Afghan-run Foundation of Culture and Civil Society, and arranging partial financial support from the British Consul.

The story begins with Landrigan and Akbar Omar meeting Jaber when she visits Kabul in March 2005. She accepts an invitation to teach several informal acting sessions at the Foundation with Afghan actors and is exhilarated by the groups’ spirited improvisations, especially those based on her description of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play-within-the-play. The men willingly perform women’s roles and the only woman present, Parwin Muschtael, embraces the idea of reverse gender casting, exchanging her headscarf for a pakool (a soft, round-topped men’s hat) to play a gruff-voiced male. When one of the actors, Nabi Tanha, told Jaber, “If you were with us for six months, we could challenge the whole country,” these were “words she could not ignore” (17). Back in Paris, Jaber, who had acted internationally with Peter Brook’s theatre company, asked his advice about the project. Brook had toured Afghanistan in 1979 and counseled her not to impose her ideas on the Afghans but to listen and take what the actors had to give her. Though the advice seemed simple, she had “no way of knowing then just how hard it would be to follow, nor how much the Afghan actors had to give her” (30).

Deciding to do Shakespeare was easy, but in April 2005, choosing the play for Kabul was complicated. Although many of the histories had elements paralleling situations in Afghanistan—for example, Richard II’s “delineation of how a civil war can erupt between rival warlords” or Henry V’s outnumbered English winning at Agincourt (23)—a comedy seemed more appropriate to peace-time optimism. However, most of the comedies “were filled with male-female interactions that could be problematic in performance” (23); even with the Taliban gone “it was difficult to know where the limits lay depicting the courtship rituals that were central to these comedies” (24). And this would be the first time in nearly thirty years that an audience in Kabul would see men and women performing together. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream had the problem of unchaperoned “young men and women flitting about a wood” (25). The Tempest, a logical choice with its young woman who had never seen a man and its theme of usurpation and reconciliation, was abandoned when the actor Jaber wanted for Prospero signed on with another of the many arts programs in Kabul, French director Ariane Mnouchkine’s acting workshops.

With The Tempest out, Love’s Labour’s Lost seemed an exciting choice, with a manageable cast size if the subplots, which were...