SABAB Theatre

Sulayman Al Bassam

SABAB (verb): to cause, bring forth, provoke,
trigger, arouse, inspire, prompt.
SABAB (noun): reason, cause, motive.

SABAB Theatre is an independent, international touring theatre company, co-founded by Georgina Van Welie and led by celebrated Kuwaiti Playwright & Director Sulayman Al Bassam.

Working internationally across national and cultural boundaries, SABAB uses theatre to engage with issues of identity, history, language and culture. The aim of SABAB’s work is to establish new spaces of action and reflection inside the contemporary Arab world and beyond it. SABAB uses as raw material the points of articulation – literary, historical, geo-political and imagined – that link the Arab World to a wider global context, and seeks to initiate new ones through a theatrical process. Working with an ensemble of pan Arab and international actors, musicians and designers, SABAB’s productions are characterised by a radical approach to text, bold production styles and playful, provocative combinations of content and form.

The company has achieved worldwide acclaim and recognition for its productions, performing to audiences across four continents. Recent work includes: In the Eruptive Mode; The Speaker’s Progress; Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for the Complete Works Festival; The Mirror for Princes / Kalila wa Dimna co-produced by the Tokyo International Arts Festival, Barbican bite06 and Dar al Athar al Islamiyyah, Kuwait; and The Al-Hamlet Summit, co-produced by the Tokyo International Arts Festival.

Sulayman Al Bassam
b. 1972, Kuwait
Lives and works in Kuwait and Paris

Sulayman Al Bassam (Playwright & Director) is widely recognised as one of the world's leading contemporary Arab theatre makers. Al Bassam's work explores themes of identity, war and individual sovereignty often set against the backdrop of civilizational overlap and tension between the Arab-Islamic world and the West. Collaborating with multinational performers and creative teams, Al Bassam's productions are characterised by a radical approach to text and provocative combinations of content and form.

Writing in English and directing in Arabic, English, French and German, Al Bassam’s work has been presented by leading international venues (i.e. BAM, Tokyo International Festival, Sydney Festival).

The 2007 premiere of Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, his adaptation of the eponymous play at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his 2013 Ritual for a Metamorphosis by Syrian playwright Saadallah Al Wannous for La Comedie Francaise in Paris marked historic moments in the presentation of Arabic language texts to world audiences.

Al Bassam was invited as Artist-in-Residence as part of NYU Gallatin’s Visiting Global Faculty Program (2015 & 2017) and to the Sundance Director’s Retreat (Arles, 2016). He gave the keynote address at NYU’s Theatre Without Borders conference (2015) and was a speaker at the World Economic Forum (Davos, 2012). He regularly acts as a juror for international arts grant-making bodies like the Rolex Mentor Program and Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. Study of his work forms part of curricula at universities in the USA and the Middle East.

A defining element of Al Bassam's work is his adaptive transposition of classic texts into the landscape of present-day politics and identity. Between 2001 and 2011 the plays that form The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy (Bloomsbury, 2014) were developed by Al Bassam with his theatre company SABAB . More recently, his work has focused on the development of original texts exploring physical and imaginary borders, and a new cycle of plays inspired by ancient texts.

Recent work includes: UR, a contemporary adaptation of the Sumerian lamentation, co-produced by Rezidenztheater, the State Theatre of Bavaria, in Munich in 2018; Petrol Station, premiered at Kennedy Center in Washington DC in March 2017; the series of female monologues, In the Eruptive Mode (International tour 2015-17). Future projects include his contemporary version of The Medea, I M E D E A, premiering at the National Opera House of Kuwait in Autumn 2021.

Al Bassam’s English language play texts are published by Oberon Modern Plays and Methuen/Bloomsbury.

In 2020, Al Bassam launches a new model for artistic production ‘Post Petroleum Society’; a think tank and cross disciplinary artistic production platform that seeks to usher the world beyond its current dependencies on carbon models and resource extraction.