East meets West in this intriguing reworking of Shakespeare’s blood-mired tale of the crookback King. The production, directed by Sulayman al-Bassam and presented by his Kuwait-based company and the Culture Project for the RSC’s Complete Works Festival, is vigorous and occasionally arresting. But it offers few insights into the politics of Shakespeare’s dramatisation of English history or of the modern Middle East.

Al-Bassam resets the action in an unnamed present-day Arab state. Here the vengeful Queen Margaret packs the gore-stained garments of her slaughtered husband and son into a designer suitcase, clearing the stage for the dangerously beaming arrival of Emir Gloucester, soon to become King Richard. As played by Fayez Kazak, beetle-browed, moustached and on his first appearance dressed in military uniform, he unavoidably calls to mind Saddam Hussein. His deformity is here limited to the wearing of a neck brace. But his jocularity and wolfish smiles seem tinged with a manic energy that hints at instability. The sense of egocentric psychosis reaches its climax in the final battle, as he gallops towards destruction, wild-eyed, astride a saddle on a metal frame.

When I last reviewed the Sulayman al-Bassam Company, in The Mirror for Princes, a rich, complex slice of Iraqi history, I remarked on the production’s impressive flair and intellectual ambition — and on its lack of focus. The same qualities, and limitations, persist here.

Lewis Gibson’s musical score combines ancient and modern, with mournful voices blending with traditional Arab instruments and synthesizers. In George Tomlinson’s designs, grainy video footage of forced confessions and executions jostle for attention with swaying figures. Richard squirms with delight when Hastings’ severed head falls with a sickening thud from the ceiling to the stage, and becomes a grisly football. And in one of the most disturbing scenes, Margaret’s curse ends in appalling cruelty when she is straddled like the horse the crazed Richard will later call for and whipped to exorcise the evil spirit that he declares has taken possession of her.

But al-Bassam’s adaptation, performed in Arabic with surtitles, stops short of radical daring; it’s a mishmash of Shakespearean poetry and modern vernacular sprinkled with references to the Koran and the war against terrorism. And the acting, despite some affecting moments, is often shouty and short on nuance.

What does emerge powerfully, however, is a sense of the way in which religion is often suborned and perverted in conflict — whether it be by al-Bassam’s Muslim Richard, or by Richmond, here a platitude-spouting Christian US general who at the play’s conclusion announces the installation of an interim government. It’s the most potent motif in a production that, if it never quite coheres, is rich in resonance.

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