Palestinian snapshots

Daniel Nelson

Can Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil capture 68 years of Palestinian life in 90 minutes? Of course not.  But her new play joyfully and movingly brings a human dimension to a dispute usually reported only in terms of

Taghrid-Choucair Vizoso

Image by Copyright: Harriet Brine

Scenes From 68* Years is a series of tragic, sad, funny, moving, tense, heartbreaking, vignettes, dramatically given life at the Arcola Theatre by a small talented cast – including a Palestinian actor Skyping in – and a simple, effective production: an upturned table stands in as a car.

They conjure up an engaging patchwork of personalities, moods and situations, punctuated by the command, “Next” as people wait at arrogantly impersonal Israeli checkpoints.

Even the final dramatic device, which I thought was going to weigh the show down with a heavy-handed message, succeeds.

There are men and women, children and old folk, soldiers and civilians, parents and charity workers, officials and shopkeepers, Arabs and Jews (“That’s the trouble with you Arabs – you always look on the bright side.”)

There’s suppressed anger, frustration, sometimes irritating, sometimes overwhelming, and nearly always there’s humour, as befits a people who have been persecuted for two centuries and another people who have been expelled from their homes.

A few reviews have criticised the production for its lack of theatrical cohesion. It’s true that the impact of the scenes varies, that here’s no plot, that most characters strut the stage and disappear, and that there’s no character development or logical sequence. But that criticism misses the point: “It’s not supposed to be a history lesson… it’s n anecdotal idea of what life is like," says Khalil. What we get are snapshots, which give an impression, and the impression is of real people scrabbling around in an impossible environment.

Sadly, the reason for the asterisk in the title – to enable productions after 2016 to refer to the years elapsed since the creation of Israel – will almost certainly be justified. There’s no end in sight for the Palestine-Israel confrontation. Hannah Khalil has no answer: we can only hope that since people got us into this mess, the sort of people featured in this play will also get us out of it.

+ 28 April, post-show discussion with the cast

* Scenes From 68* Years by Hannah Khalil is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8, £17/£14, until 30 April. Info: www.arcolatheatre.com 

+ http://oneworld.org/2016/04/10/palestine-scenes-but-not-yet-fully-heard/ Palestine: Scenes, but not yet fully heard