Review: I Am Yusuf And This Is My Brother - The Jewish Chronicle

There are a lot of plays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a subject that exercises playwrights across the political spectrum and the theatrical landscape, from the top of the establishment to the fringiest agitprop.

So many offerings are there in fact, you would think that a major season would have sprung up by now. Such an event might allow audiences who seek out one perspective to be exposed to another.

I wonder for instance how many who see this impressive, new (to this country) work by Palestinian writer and director Amir Nizar Zuabi would have also seen, say, Dai (Enough) by Israel’s Iris Bahr when it was staged in London last year.

Or how many of the largely Jewish audience who saw Dai will seek out a Palestinian writer’s perspective, especially in Israel, where both plays have been performed.

Of these “conflict” dramas, I’ve lost count of the ones about Israeli soldiers who fight in the West Bank and Gaza. There is a play about Arab and Israeli food, there are plays about living under Israeli occupation, about suicide bombers and about the security wall.

Of the plays that are critical of Israeli policy and attitudes towards Palestinians I have seen none more powerfully damning than Plonter (Tangle), an Israeli/Arab co-production devised by Tel Aviv’s Cameri theatre.

Yet few, if any, have delivered a moment of realisation achieved by Nizar’s play. It is a production that manages to bridge the gap between something that is known and something that is understood. And perhaps more strangely still, it achieves this not by what is included in the play, but by what is left out — namely Jews and Israelis.

Performed in English and Arabic with surtitles (some of which are projected onto a suspended tin bath, the symbolism of which completely escapes me), I Am Yusuf is concerned only with a Palestinian perspective. There will be those ready to accuse Zuabi of imbalance — always a lazy criticism — but I am willing to bet that they will be won over by the sheer humanity of this piece.

Set mainly in 1948 as the United Nations vote declaring Israel’s existence draws near, this memory play, co-produced by the Young Vic and Palestinian theatre company ShiberHur, is seen largely through the eyes and experience of two young brothers, the simple-minded Yusuf and his older sibling Ali. On one level the play delivers a portrait of an Arab village that we are told used to exist in the Galilee before it was destroyed.

Jon Bausor’s design evokes the residents’ present and future by setting the action beneath a sand-coloured canvas hoisted into the shape of the landscape they will soon leave or the refugee tents they will soon inhabit.

Processions of women carry water jars on their heads; Ali, a bit of a bully in the way most older brothers are, playfully and painfully beats Yusuf until a passing British soldier imposes imperialist order on the kids. The British Mandate is near its end.

Against this background, the plot, which is remembered in flashback by an elderly Yusuf, centres on the courting Ali and Nada, whose father, it emerges, betrays the Palestinian resistance by selling his land. To whom it is obvious, though not specified. And this is the strength of Zuabi’s play. Where it points an accusing finger, it is not so much at the “enemy”, but at those who “solve the problem of Europe where it’s nothing to do with Europe” — i.e. the British.

The rights and wrongs of this argument do not much matter. More important is the realisation that the story of one people — the offstage, unmentioned Jews — is revealed as being almost completely irrelevant to another people, the onstage Arabs of Palestine. And the same could be said about many plays about the establishment of Israel as told from a Jewish perspective.

In one, by Ben Brown, which is soon to open at the Orange Tree theatre in London, Chaim Weizman is shown talking to Britain’s Lord Balfour about Jewish persecution and the necessity of Israel’s existence. Weizman concludes that the Arabs “will have to go elsewhere”. It might turn out to be the most controversial line in that play. But the pertinent point here is that just as Brown’s play reveals that the Palestinian experience was largely irrelevant to Jews, Zuabi’s play shows that the Jewish experience was just as irrelevant to Palestinians.

It may be that neither playwright set out to make this particular point. In I Am Yusuf it is almost incidental to a lyrical story about the bond between brothers (well played by Ali Sliman and particularly Amer Hlehel as the simple sibling) and which relates the bewilderment of a population on the move as a result of forces over which they have no control and about which they have little understanding.

But Zuabi’s production also has a light touch as it moves from comedy to a deeply mournful quality established by some of the most beautiful singing in the theatre, by Tarez Sliman, I have heard in a long time.

I am left wondering, even hoping, that if each side exposed itself to its enemy’s stories, the “enemy” may not appear quite so “alien” after all. And that maybe a season of plays about and around the conflict is just the place to do it.