Caryl Churchill may have written the
first play about the Gaza bombardment to arrive on a British stage (the
week after next), but she has been scooped to a certain extent by the
fortuitously scheduled visit – the first to Britain in over 20 years –
by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv with its 2005 piece
Plonter.
The title means “tangle”, and the succession of scenes portray a mess
of direct and indirect connections between characters. The first scene
shows a patronising,
soi-disant
liberal Jewish wife who has invited a token couple of Arabs to dine
with her; her son, serving in the Israel Defence Forces, has just shot
dead a young Palestinian boy; the victim’s friends then form a cell to
commit a suicide bombing; another reprisal is the murder of a baby in a
Jewish settlement in the disputed territories; his mother then begins
abusively picketing a checkpoint in the “Security Fence”, which is
actually situated in the living room of an Arab couple’s house, so that
they require military clearance to go to the kitchen or toilet…
This last-mentioned is a slice of fiercely satirical absurdism, as the
soldier manning the checkpoint demands proof of a babe-in-arms’ age in
case he is a 16-year-old in disguise. Elsewhere, there is some subtlety
which an English-speaking audience could miss in this bilingual
production: as far as I could tell from the surtitling, the dead
Palestinian boy’s mother is shown giving two radically different
responses to his death, but the diatribe of revenge and martyrdom is in
Hebrew and that of loving grief in Arabic, as if speakers of each
language hear what they expect from her. Yael Ronen’s company consists
of five Jews and four Arabs, each playing a variety of characters of
each persuasion. The set is dominated by moveable sections of the
“Fence”, in the shadow of which the cycle of reprisals and the babel of
demagoguery continue. One Jewish extremist pledges that henceforth, the
tariff will be
two eyes for
an eye, calling to mind Gandhi’s remark and suggesting that the world
will go blind so much the quicker. And perhaps the most disheartening
aspect of all is that, despite the company’s deep well of commitment
and lived experience, the piece tells us nothing new to animate our
concerns afresh.
Written for the Financial
Times.