Name: ______________________

In a 19th-century British church on a hill in Aden, the ghost of Hamlet’s father has appeared, his veined, broken
hands wavering in the sharp stage light as he pleads with his son. “If thou didst ever thy dear father love,
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”

In the audience a young woman in a black headscarf starts to weep, transfixed by words written 400 years ago
by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon and now translated into the Adeni dialect of Arabic.

Aside from the voice of Hamlet’s father, there is silence in this audience of 250 men and women, crammed onto
benches in the nave. To stage left, eyes furrowed in concentration, sits Amr Gamal, the 39-year-old director and
founder of the Khaleej Aden acting troupe, who has, by sheer force of personality, managed to put on a
production of Hamlet in his war-scarred city.

Ever since civil war broke out in Yemen in 2014, Aden has been caught between the Houthi
rebels who hold the north, including the capital Sanaa, pro-government forces backed by
Saudi Arabia, southern separatists and Islamist terror groups including Islamic State and al-
Qaeda, as well as other militias. Its infrastructure in tatters, Aden bears the scars of a conflict that shows
few signs of ending.

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Gamal first had the idea to try to stage Hamlet there at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when, late one
night in his living room, he was looking for a film to watch online. Instead, he discovered that two august
British institutions — the National Theatre and the Globe — had filmed a number of their performances and
made them available for purchase online. For an obsessive like Gamal, who consumed film, television and
theatre into his veins, this was irresistible.

But the collapse of the Yemeni banking system meant he didn’t even have a credit card. Instead, to his enduring
shame, he downloaded Romeo and Juliet illegally. As he watched it, he realised the performance wasn’t that far
from the type of pared-back shows his own troupe had put on in the past. Then, he thought of Hamlet, a play he
had long dreamt of adapting. “I thought, ‘I can do it,’ ” he remembers.

Among the countless hurdles to staging one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays in Aden was the problem of
money. Owing to the war and the pandemic, his troupe had struggled to work for years and was so poor it didn’t
even have a place to store costumes, let alone put together an ambitious production. Enter the British Council,
the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations, and Rowaida Khulaidi, its head of Yemen operations.
After meeting Gamal in 2021 she was taken aback by the clarity of his vision for Hamlet and wanted to help.
Soon she had secured the troupe more than £40,000 in British government funding.

Two years after that initial meeting, militias, suspicion from locals, faulty lighting, stray cats and a missing prop
gun have all conspired to bring down Gamal’s production. But now the ghost of Hamlet’s father is speaking and
the audience is breathless. Gamal is in the midst of achieving something truly remarkable, and the thing that
drives him is Aden, the beautiful port city at the heart of it all — bombed, looted and forgotten, but not by him.

Despite the war and the suffering, Aden today is still, in some ways, a paradise. Fishermen in dhows slide
through the bath-warm water of the bay and pick lobsters straight from the sea; piles of plump shrimp, thick as
your thumb, are served in shacks by the beach — the food tastes of southern India, Arabia and the spice islands
of Zanzibar, the trading routes where Aden was once a vital way station.

The city itself lies inside a huge dormant volcano. When Portuguese sailors first came here their etchings
showed a great city rising from the crater, but from the late 16th century under Ottoman rule it dwindled into

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little more than a pirate village preying on passing ships. By the time Captain Stafford Haines and 700 of his
men were sent there by the East India Company in 1839, there wasn’t much left of the “Eye of Yemen”. Haines

ensured that Aden and its fine natural harbour became Queen Victoria’s first imperial acquisition —
and a vital refuelling stop on the way to India. It was governed as part of British India until 1937,
and subsequently as a Crown colony in its own right.

Over the next century, soldiers, traders and their families flooded in from Britain and built a society in the
neighbourhood known as Crater, swimming at the lido, eating ices at the beach and putting on dances at the
officers’ club. When the 28-year-old Queen Elizabeth visited in 1954, flag-waving crowds welcomed her and
she stayed at the impeccably outfitted Crescent Hotel, where her room overlooked a statue of her great-
greatgrandmother, Victoria, in a nearby park.

Not everyone was happy with colonial rule, however. In the 1960s, amid a nationalist insurgency, the British
authorities presided over the torture and abuse of civilians suspected of being militants. By 1967, as the
insurgency continued and the Suez Canal closed, the British realised their position was untenable and left.
Marxist southern Yemeni authorities took over. After reunification with the north in 1990, the newly formed
Yemeni government presided over the neglect, destruction and damage of some of the city’s most important
historical sites.

Gamal believes they saw the city as a place without history — nothing more than a British trading post with
meek, collaborationist locals. Disproving that idea is his life’s work. In the week I spend with him he takes me
around every monument, ruin and church remnant he can find — all that remains of a prosperous cosmopolitan
past. A Star of David on the wall of a house where a Jewish family once lived. A Hindu temple sacked by
extremists in 2015, where a stele of a sacred cow lies smashed on the ground and the Muslim caretakers do their
best to keep it safe from further damage.

The lido is closed, the Crescent Hotel is a looted ruin, the statue of Queen Victoria is covered in bird droppings.
Everywhere, historical structures are being torn down and concrete shacks or apartment blocks put up in their
place.

A dilapidated statue of Queen Victoria in the city.

We trudge up the hill in the baking sun to look at the Aden tanks, a millennia-old water collection system
renovated by the British where, in the summer, families come to swim and barbecue. “I was always raised on the
idea that I should stand for the city, I should do something, I should put it in the limelight,” he says. And that is
what he has done.

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Gamal grew up in the 1990s. As a child he used to walk across town to the Hurricane cinema to watch
Bollywood films. He’d beg his friends to come with him and then storm out if they started talking. Back then
Aden had more than a dozen cinemas, showing everything from Mumbai love stories to Soviet-era topless films.

There were bars and nightclubs serving Seera beer, named after the castle that overlooks the city. Gamal’s
mother and aunts wore their hair loose. Then everything began to change. As the fundamentalists arrived, more
women started to cover their faces and young people stopped gathering to socialise. The nightclubs and
breweries closed, and so did the cinemas.

Watching the freedom and beauty of his city erode before him, Gamal decided to take action. In 2006 he
gathered a few like-minded people and convinced the owner of the long-shuttered Hurricane cinema to let them
stage a play there. There was every possibility they would fail but that October, ten years after the last
commercial play had closed in Aden, the curtain rose again. On the first night a full house of 350 people —
most of them women — came to see the Khaleej Aden troupe perform.

“It turned out to be a huge comedy,” Gamal says. “People were dying of laughter. That was something I had
never imagined. They were laughing, cracking up, standing up and clapping for maybe five minutes.”

Word spread and, as the rest of the play’s run sold out, a new tradition was born. Each year Gamal would put on
a new production, always resisting pressure to have separate performances for men and women. Their job was
growing tougher all the time as al-Qaeda and its affiliates grew in power. Theatres are a potential target for
religious extremists. One morning the troupe found a bomb planted among the cinema seats. It turned out to be
fake and the next afternoon they were back, trying not to think about how easy it would be for someone to lob a
grenade over the wall.

The packed audience enjoys the humour the director has brought to certain scenes.

In 2011 the Arab Spring spread across the region and, three years later, Yemen’s government in Sanaa, 186
miles north of Aden, collapsed and Iran-linked Houthi rebels took control. In the summer of 2015, Aden also
fell to the Houthis.

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“No one was walking outside because if someone walked around they would shoot you,” Gamal recalls. Then
the Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, launched a counter-offensive. Aden became their temporary
capital, and remains so today, while the Houthis still hold Sanaa.

As civil war swirled around them Gamal and his family survived, but in-fighting between anti-Houthi groups
and the rising threat of terror attacks made Aden wildly unstable and dangerous. Extremists burnt down a church
and smashed up a Hindu temple. It was hard enough to find food, let alone worry about theatrical productions.

Then the pandemic struck and Gamal began to nurture his impossible dream — to stage Hamlet. The language,
the plot and the geographical reach — a ship bound for England in one scene, a noblewoman’s
(Ophelia) madness in the corridors of Elsinore castle the next — seemed unattainably ambitious. But
Shakespeare had done it with nothing but a bare stage on the banks of the Thames.

“If I had written Hamlet, no one would believe it was executable,” Gamal says. “Everyone would say it was
impossible to stage. So it was always this question for me. How did Shakespeare think about it? How did he
convince everyone to perform it?”

Gamal knew he would have to instil confidence in his actors, and in himself as director, before he could even
attempt it. “Then I thought, I can do it in a church. A church could be Elsinore.” And he knew exactly which
church it would be.

The stone building that was once the Anglican church of St Mary’s stands on a small hill in Crater, overlooking
a former Jewish girls’ school. It was built by the British in 1871 and became the seat of Yemen’s legislative
council in 1947. When Gamal was growing up, he had walked past it on the way to school. He knew its high
ceilings and stained-glass windows would make the ideal setting for the play.

But there were serious problems. The building had fallen into disrepair. The roof had been damaged by shrapnel
and bullets. Perhaps most pertinently, it was being used as the headquarters of a militia. Men with guns were
sleeping on the floor — and they weren’t interested in leaving. Gamal pleaded with the governor of Aden. Fahed
Shuraih, the production manager, went to the commander of the militia. “Everyone told us it was impossible,”
Gamal says.

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After weeks of careful negotiation the militia relented, agreeing to move into portable buildings set up in the
church grounds. Gamal was ready to begin, but money remained a big problem. He had insisted on using half of
the British Council money to renovate the church — not just for the performance, but as a historical monument.

The money was given to experts from the Yemeni government, who oversaw the renovation, and the rest was
paid by a local businessman. But they could still only afford to put on the play for ten days.

They also needed help to figure out how to bring Hamlet to life in Aden, a city where many people hadn’t been
to a theatre before or even heard of Shakespeare. He had to make it lighter and more relatable.

Gamal gathered a cast and began rehearsals. The British Council’s Khulaidi put him in touch with the Globe in
London and the Volcano theatre in south Wales, and they held online sessions — using a generator when the
electricity went out — to figure out costumes, staging and how to cut back some of the longer monologues
without losing the power of the scene.

“I was fascinated by the Globe,” Gamal says. “I felt like I understood what they’re doing … It’s not vastly
different. That made me a bit more confident.”

Aden becomes a Crown colony in 1934.

It wasn’t easy. Some of the older cast members, who hadn’t been on stage for years because the theatres had
been closed, kept forgetting their lines. The actor Gamal wanted to play Hamlet emigrated to France. Polonius
died. The actor playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father was almost blind and could walk up stairs but not down, so
they had to position someone to guide him. One sponsor withdrew after finding out they were putting on the
play in a church.

Slowly, through last autumn, the cast began to take shape. Noor Zaker was eight when she first went to see one
of Gamal’s plays and begged to be part of them. Now she was 19, light-voiced and quick to laugh, fine-boned as
a bird. She would play Ophelia. She would be performing without a hijab, and although her
family supported her she knew she would face a backlash.

“I’m worried about how society will react,” Zaker says in the run-up to opening night, sitting on a bench by the
church, overlooking Crater. “I know that by doing Hamlet I’m taking a big risk.” After this, she says, her dream

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is to get out of the country. “I love my city, I love Aden. But what can I achieve by that? I have to look after my
future. It’s sad, because I don’t have those opportunities here.”

Shorooq Khaif, 53, the glamorous actress who plays Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, speaks with conviction of her
willingness to take the risk to appear in the play. “All my emotion is consumed,” she says, praising Gamal’s
dedication. “As much as it’s very difficult to work with Amr’s level of detail, he also takes the actors to the next
level.”

Over the autumn Gamal asked Ahmed Alyafay, 36, who would play Hamlet, to lose 12kg — and he did. One
day they spent six hours, just the two of them, rehearsing on stage. “We lost the feeling of time,” Alyafay says.
“I enjoyed the madness of Hamlet.”

Like most of the other actors, Alyafay has a day job — as a producer on Yemeni TV. Qassem Rashad, one of the
other stars, is a lawyer but works as a bus driver as well as putting on sketch shows. He is so funny that Gamal
hesitated to let him on stage during serious scenes, because people tend to laugh simply at the sight of him.

All have signed up to this immense and dangerous performance because they believe in Gamal. But as the hours
tick down to curtain-up there is everything to play for — and everything to lose.

On the day of the first performance I go to Gamal’s house. We sit in his dining room as his mother serves plates
of fish with tahini and spiced chicken biryani. Gamal seems calm but he isn’t. In a country where almost every
man owns a Kalashnikov, the troupe had struggled to find a prop gun. Eventually they unearthed a pistol-shaped
lighter, which would have to do. And the previous night, at the dress rehearsal, a stray cat had walked onto the
stage during an emotionally fraught scene, making the audience laugh and ruining the moment.

“I was in a rage,” Gamal says. “Today it won’t be like this.”

This evening, on opening night, people will be stationed around the church, making sure no windows are open
— and no cats get in. Still, Gamal frets that nobody will turn up. The play has to run between 7.30pm and 11pm,
otherwise it would clash with the call to prayer. But on social media people have complained that this is too late.
And even if they do come, will the audience be bored? Will the plot be too complicated? Will the lighting,
which has just arrived at the last moment, work? “We are all afraid of this,” Gamal says.

We talk about the impact that his drive to create has had on his life. In a country where family is everything, he
decided not to marry or have children. Having a family wouldn’t be compatible with this type of work — not in
this culture, or this city.

“Living in Yemen is like a game of snakes and ladders. You go up, up, up and then you find the snake and fall,”
he says. “That’s how you live. Suddenly something happens, so you have to start over.”

It would be easier, he adds, not to feel as passionate about his city as he does. “The base of all suffering is
attachment.”

And at around 4pm he leaves to begin the preparations for a night that could make or break him.

An hour before the play is set to begin, a crowd has gathered on the steps of the church. A boy in a glittering
bow tie stands next to his mum, who is wearing an abaya and with a zebra-print handbag. Malek, 16, stands with
her dad. She begged him to take her, but has never been to a play before and has no idea what to expect. “I’m
very excited,” she says shyly.

Inside the church, the final preparations are under way. Khaif, the actress who plays Hamlet’s mother, stands
regal and solemn in the dressing room as people rush around her. Noor Zaker, the 19-year-old actress, is sitting
on the floor, fiddling with a cannula in her arm — yesterday she was rushed to the hospital with low blood
pressure. She is worried about a scene in which she has to carry a heavy suitcase across the stage. If she drops it,
she will break the spell of the play. But she refuses to be afraid. “If I make a mistake, I’ll deal with it,” she says.

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 The cast receives a standing ovation on opening night.

The doors open and the audience is ushered in, craning their heads to gape up at the stained-glass windows.
Then the lights are lowered and the pulpit becomes the dark, fog-wreathed grounds of Elsinore castle. Zaker
doesn’t drop the suitcase. The ghost of Hamlet’s father doesn’t fall down the stairs. And the audience, far from
being bored, laugh and wail and clap. The city of Aden, its accents and characters — including a famous lemon
seller, whose trademark cry Gamal has worked into a market scene — sprout from every moment of the play.
And there are no stray cats.

“It’s indescribable. I saw in the audience’s eyes. They were captivated by the play,” Khaif says, laughing,
disbelieving, after the curtain falls.

Gamal had done it. He’d made the impossible play possible. And all around him were his city, his
people — and the possibility of a future.

Callaghan, Louise. "To be or not to be? How Hamlet was staged amid Yemen's civil war." The Sunday
Times Magazine, 19 Mar. 2023, pp. 34-41. The Times, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ to-be-or-not-to-be-
how-hamlet-was-staged-amid-yemens-civil-war-wxc7q3nx3.