'Israel/Palestine'. 'Tongue firmly in cheek'. Yeah. Re-read it if you have to. Tall order, eh? A difficult path to navigate just writing a play that doesn’t come out a little bit antisemitic, anti-muslim, Zionist, Orientalist, anti-Western, pro-Western or just muddled. There’s so much in which to get entangled. Playwright Richard Fredman, wisely steers clear of this and, if anything, his portrayal of the engaged parties is mainly fairly reasoned, relates a lot of facts and is only slightly partial. The play, however, is guilty of crimes of a more theatrical nature.Englishman Michael Crossley (Paul Brendan), Sunday School teacher and subject to a recent break-up with his spouse, sets out for the Holy Land to bathe in the River Jordan near Jericho. Cue lots of solemn singing of upbeat gospel hymn ‘Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho’. As naif-acting as a cultural prism, he bumbles through Israel/Palestine, enraptured first by Orthodox Jews at the Mount in Jerusalem, saves a Palestinian’s family from the imminent bulldozing of their house and manages to engender a situation only a hapless Englishman in a farce-with-a-message could. By gunpoint he ends up driving a car towards Jericho with a Zionist settler Jew on the brink of going into labour, the Palestinian whose family he saved and an anthropologist-cum-activist. There's a ridiculous 20 minutes where everybody switches places in a moving car and they have a go at making fun of those crazy stereotypes. And then there's one of those denouements, where the metaphor of the situation in Israel/Palestine hitting a brick wall is hackneyedly alluded to by the car literally hitting a brick wall. And then exploding.Watching the company bring all this to life is akin to running your fingernails down a blackboard for an hour. Except it's actually like doing that, but with your teeth instead. Everything, apart from the self-consciously solemn bits, is mugged to the audience and overacted to the point of almost parodying the Legs Akimbo educational theatre satire in the BBC's 'The League of Gentlemen'. Brendan's cultural naif schtick wears thin after 5 minutes, thus making the remaining 55 minutes where the other characters relate information about daily life in Israel/Palestine a lesson in how to patronise your audience. It's thoroughly brilliant way to undermine the interesting facts it tries to impart. The scenes which take place in cars - which is much of the play - are depicted by four upright blocks the characters sit and jiggle on, whilst wacky 'ethnic' chase music/travelling music plays behind it. When something of consequence happens - in order to show that it is important and serious and we must pay attention because we can't tell what is important as we the audience are simple folk who sometimes forget to even keep breathing - these blocks are picked up by the actors and waggled above their heads for a bit in slow motion before they fall about onto the stage. It's not just how patronising this play is. By making it a farce, this production belittles a thoroughly complicated conflict. Larger-than-life wacky characters are not just difficult to watch on stage, their unreal portrayals mark them down as eccentric individuals, not as synechdoches able to stand in for the situation as a whole. If the thrust of your piece is a message about Israel/Palestine, you'd best make them real people who feel like they're part of the conflict. Their motives thus become part of their individual insanity, rather than something affected by the societies they live in.And at the end, masked in a terrible production and laugh-less comedy, the message gets lost. The message about the hundreds that die over the idea of Israel/Palestine.
