Sheyma Buali reviews the world premiere of a boisterous Tunisian take on Shakespeare's tale of the corruption of power, where the eponymous tyrant and his wife are reincarnated as Leïla and Zine Ben Ali.
“How many Macbeths do we have in the Arab world?”, the narrator asks in his poetic introduction, giving context to this new version of Macbeth about to have its world premiere.
Rewritten to fit the current Tunisian scenario, here we see the recently ousted Tunisian president Zine Al Abedine Ben Ali and his wife, Leila replacing the Scottish Macbeth and his Lady. Straddling the margins between the pathetic and the fierce, the parallels between reality and this Shakespearian work make it a fitting prism for a historical enquiry into the cycles of power and oppression that have dominated Tunisian (and greater Middle Eastern) history for decades.
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