A collaboration that has produced an extraordinarily telling and funny solo play
If this title comes trailing associations of defiance, hatred and violence, you may think that’s par for the course. After all, ‘from the river to the sea’ has long been considered a slogan asserting the rights of the Palestinian community. Now, however, it inspires a new one-man show that will make you laugh rather than weep and, importantly, reconsider afresh what is so often dubbed “the current situation in the Middle East”.
Between the River and the Sea is performed by Israeli-Palestinian Yousef Sweid, who co-wrote it with Austrian director Isabella Sedlak. He plays himself, “an average Palestinian man living in Berlin”, and begins by sharing “some souvenirs from throughout the years” – (mostly hostile) banners he has collected. One in particular is from the disruption of the Merchant of Venice, presented by Tel Aviv’s Habima Theatre, at London’s Globe Theatre in 2012. The words, “Israeli apartheid! Leave the stage!” are brandished on a protestor’s banner. “We made it onto the front page of The Guardian,” Yousef comments. “I hope we’ll make it again.”
As he opens up to the audience (“yes, I am an Arab… from Israel… a Palestinian-Israeli”), Yousef is interrupted by the harsh miked-up voice of his father (also voiced by Yousef, sound design by Thomas Moked Blum). “You are not a Palestinian-Israeli,” booms the disembodied voice, “you are a Palestinian with an Israeli passport.” His father then instructs him to tell the audience about “the Arabs of 48”, indicating the Nakba, or “the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948. When the Brits gave Palestine to the Jews and … we lost Palestine”. Yousef does a swift but extensive round-up of different “kinds of Palestinians”, living everywhere from east Jerusalem to refugee camps in Jordan to Berlin to Canada and beyond. “Like my father, Sliman, who escaped Israel,” he explains. “Not because Zionists were hunting him, no. Because of tax fraud. And he owes a lot of money to the black market.” This undercurrent of humour is what fuels Between the River and the Sea, like a sweetener to help the hard-hitting moments go down.
Yousef, we learn, has more pressing personal problems than politics, however. He is meeting with a divorce lawyer to end his marriage to his second wife. Both wives are Jewish, he clarifies, and he has a child with each of them. Now his second wife wants to move back to Israel and take their daughter with her. “Seriously? Israel?” Yousef says, confounded. “That’s the best environment you choose to raise our kid? Our mixed Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Israeli-kid?”
Israel is not a place Yousef remembers fondly when it comes to his childhood. There weren’t “open-minded international mini Berliners” with whom his daughter currently gets to share a kindergarten. In his youth in Haifa, he recalls a moment when a Jewish boy referred to him as “Aravi masri'ach” – “stinky Arab” – which has echoed in his life ever since. “From now on,” he says, “every eventuality, good or bad, is connected to being an Arab. If a Jewish woman is not interested in me. If a Jewish woman is interested in me. All my failures, all my successes, all my stories are connected to being an Arab.”
It is perhaps no surprise that the title nods not only to the Israel-Palestine “situation”, but also to Yousef’s own battle with identity and the pressure to pick a side, pulled as he is between Palestine and Israel. Though he does come to the conclusion that there is “no one side or the other”, there is “just us”, he says, alluding to his family. Between the River and the Sea is not only eye-opening from a unique angle, but immensely engaging.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Holly Revell
Between the River and the Sea runs until Saturday 9 May. £15-£30. Royal Court Theatre, London, SW1W 8AS. royalcourttheatre.com