Sulayman Al Bassam is one of the world's leading contemporary dramatists. His adaptations of Shakespeare, performed around the world, have won many awards and met with widespread acclaim on four continents. This volume brings together for the first time three of Al Bassam's adaptations of Shakespearean plays - including versions of Hamlet, Richard III and Twelfth Night - collectively known as The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy. The al-Hamlet Summit sees the familiar characters of Hamlet reborn as delegates placed in a conference room in an unnamed modern Arab state on the brink of war; Richard III: an Arab Tragedy is a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's classic, reworked and transplanted into the scorching oil-rich Islamic world of the Gulf; while The Speaker's Progress is a forensic reconstruction of Twelfth Night which transforms into an unequivocal act of defiance towards the state, forming a dark satire on the decades of hopelessness and political inertia that fed twenty-first-century revolts across the Arab region.The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy features an editorial introduction and annotation by Graham Holderness, positioning the plays within the contexts of both modern Shakespearean drama and Arab culture as well as an author's preface by Sulayman Al Bassam, detailing the plays' history of theatrical reception and outlining his philosophy of Shakespeare adaptation.

The room is set up like a conference hall somewhere in the Arab world, or perhaps like the legislative assembly of a small modern state. There are desks with push-button microphones and headsets. Behind, there is a screen, as if someone planned to give a Powerpoint presentation. But the names on the desks are the familiar characters from "Hamlet". The setting of Sulayman Al Bassam's powerful, disturbing version of the "Hamlet" story is a modern Middle-Eastern state whose old king has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, westernised dictator who has married the old king's wife to legitimise his rule, and calls his regime a "new democracy".

In Ancient Sumeria, a woman’s desire for sexual sovereignty and radical vision of civic plurality draws the anger and outrage of the male status quo and unleashes catastrophe onto her city and her body. The seminal Lamentation for the Destruction of the City of Ur is the first poem written for a civic entity -- a city -- in the history of mankind. Writing scenes across multiple timelines that stretch from 2000 BC, to the European Imperialist fantasies of the late 19th Century, to the ISIS destruction of Palmyra in 2015, to a distorted Utopian vision of the future, Al Bassam’s play is a riot of imagination and poetic archaeology, exploring themes of iconoclasm, civic space and feminine apotheosis. UR evokes the utopia and destruction of one of humanity's oldest cities, and is played by an ensemble composed of four Arabic actors working alongside four members of the Residenztheater ensemble.