Statelessness and (il)legitimacy in Al Bassam’s Petrol Station and Shakespeare’s King Lear

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Kuwaiti British playwright Sulayman Al Bassam’s Petrol Station (2017) draws on themes, tropes, and motifs from Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) to dramatize the plight of stateless people worldwide. Al Bassam’s use of King Lear hinges on the fact that it is a play that depicts fraught family bonds against the backdrop of national concerns, a question that Petrol Station vividly dramatizes. First, both plays open with an old patriarch making an important decision. Although the two patriarchs propose that their decisions will ensure justice and integrity, ironically, the decision taken by each patriarch wreaks havoc, augments sibling rivalry, and eventually creates a chaotic situation that exacerbates divisions and frictions. Second, in both plays a patriarch has a legitimate son and an illegitimate one whose relationships are marred by continual conflicts and clashes. However, while in Shakespeare’s play, the illegitimate son is Machiavellian and malevolent, in Al Bassam’s play, the illegitimate son is helpless and even naïve. Furthermore, some characters in Al Bassam’s play can be viewed to have traces of Shakespeare’s characters, particularly the Fool, who critically comments on the course of actions. Finally, both plays end tragically with people committing suicide or being killed and carried to the stage. Overall, Al Bassam’s play draws our attention to the harsh conditions that stateless people, represented by the illegitimate son of the petrol station’s owner, endure daily. In this sense, Al Bassam’s play draws on Shakespeare’s representation of violence to depict how stateless people are subdued and oppressed.