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

The study explores how Sulayman Al Bassam’s Petrol Station (2017) appropriates Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) to interrogate identity, borders, loyalty, betrayal, power, and civil conflict, situating private family dynamics within national and geopolitical crises. Building on Al Bassam’s own framing of the play as a dystopian narrative intersecting with contemporary events, the article proposes that King Lear’s intertwining of family bonds and public concerns makes it a crucial intertext for depicting statelessness. Focusing on the Manager—a bastard and stateless figure paralleling Edmund yet reimagined as non-villainous—the paper argues that Petrol Station foregrounds the ontological deprivation of stateless people (after Arendt and Parekh), dramatizing how exclusionary nation-formation produces vulnerability, marginalization, and violence.

The paper surveys Al Bassam’s oeuvre, notably his Arab Shakespeare Trilogy (Al-Hamlet Summit, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, The Speaker’s Progress), and notes prior commentary identifying Shakespearean resonances in Petrol Station (Wofford 2017; Pressley 2017; Lokke & Al Bassam 2021). It reviews Saleh et al. (2023), which reads Petrol Station through liminality, identity, and borders, while observing that the Lear connection remains underexplored there. The article engages broader scholarship on adaptation/appropriation (Sanders 2015; Lanier 2014), national identity and King Lear (Maley 2011; Kim 2013), and ethical/political frameworks on statelessness (Arendt 1951/1973; Parekh 2014), positioning the current analysis to fill a gap by systematically tracing Lear-derived themes, tropes, and motifs in Al Bassam’s play to illuminate statelessness.

A qualitative, comparative close reading and intertextual analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Al Bassam’s Petrol Station. The study: (1) identifies structural and thematic correspondences (patriarchal decrees, legitimate/illegitimate sons, the Fool analogue, tragic denouements); (2) analyzes character reconfigurations (Edmund reimagined as a stateless, non-villainous Manager; Edgar mirrored in a corrupt legitimate brother, the Cashier); (3) interprets symbolic motifs (the Meter, hanging, bodies carried onstage) and spatial politics (border zone, war-torn landscape) in light of appropriation theory (Sanders; Lanier); and (4) situates findings within discourses of nationhood, citizenship, and the ontology of statelessness (Arendt; Parekh). Evidence includes textual citations from the Oberon edition of Petrol Station (2017) and standard King Lear editions, production context (Kennedy Center, 2017), and critical responses.

• Petrol Station appropriates King Lear’s family-state nexus: both open with consequential patriarchal decrees (Lear’s division of the kingdom; the Father’s order to find the Meter), which exacerbate rivalry and social disorder.
• The legitimate/illegitimate dyad is inverted: unlike Edmund, the illegitimate Manager is sympathetic, honest, and stateless; the legitimate Cashier is exploitative and villainous, hoarding wealth via smuggling and dehumanizing his half-brother.
• Lear’s Fool is echoed by Joseph, whose cryptic commentary and prophecy-like discourse guide audience interpretation and foreshadow upheaval.
• Tragic closure mirrors Lear: suicides and deaths accumulate; bodies are borne onstage (Manager with Noah parallels Lear with Cordelia); hanging recurs (Joseph/Cordelia), underscoring pervasive violence.
• Statelessness is dramatized as ontological deprivation: the Manager’s identity is rendered “blank” (place of birth, nationality, etc.) and he is denied mobility (no passport), subjected to stigma, othering, and legal exclusion.
• The borderland petrol station as liminal space foregrounds exclusionary nation-formation and the policing of belonging; the Manager’s treatment delineates who counts as part of the nation.
• The Meter functions as a truth/justice device: the Manager seeks legitimate revelation rather than forgery, reversing Edmund’s methods and aligning bastardy with moral integrity.
• The play suggests a glimmer of hope: the Girl’s gift of her dead brother’s passport to the Manager gestures toward a possible end to his statelessness, reframing the tragic arc with a moment of recognition and potential redress.

By mapping structural, characterological, and symbolic parallels to King Lear, the analysis demonstrates how Petrol Station leverages Shakespeare’s cultural capital to expose contemporary injustices tied to citizenship regimes and border politics. Reimagining Edmund as a stateless, non-villainous protagonist reorients audience sympathy, converting the Lear template into a critique of exclusionary nation-building and legal precarity. The border station’s liminality and the patriarch’s decree foreground how private kinship hierarchies reflect national logics of inclusion/exclusion. The findings underscore the relevance of Shakespearean appropriation for articulating modern crises (refugees, trafficking, civil conflict), advancing conversations in adaptation studies and political theory on the ethics of belonging and the human costs of statelessness.

The paper shows that Petrol Station is a palimpsestic appropriation of King Lear that merges bastardy with statelessness in the Manager, using Lear-derived structures (patriarchal decree, sibling rivalry, Fool-like commentary, tragic denouement) to interrogate citizenship, national identity, and exclusion. The most salient parallel is the legitimate/illegitimate dyad, reconfigured to elicit empathy for stateless subjects and to critique social and legal stigmas. While mirroring Lear’s tragedy, the play introduces a tentative hope through the Manager’s acquisition of a passport, symbolically countering ontological deprivation. The study contributes to Shakespearean appropriation scholarship and human rights discourse by illuminating how canonical frameworks can be mobilized to represent and contest statelessness. Future research might extend to performance analyses across different cultural contexts, comparative studies with other Shakespeare appropriations addressing displacement, and audience reception of statelessness narratives.