Shakespeare in the West Bank: British troupe savour ‘Elizabethan’ crowd

Raucous audience at Bethlehem refugee camp see closing performance of The Tempest by Jericho House theatre It was, said the director, an Elizabethan atmosphere. People came and went throughout the play. There was chatter and laughter and crying babies. One boy kicked a football, another swung from an overhead metal bar near the stage. Yet this was not the Globe theatre on the south bank of the Thames, but an open-air performance in the shadow of Israel’s concrete wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem. One of the defining symbols of the occupation, here the wall towers over a Palestinian refugee camp, making it perhaps an appropriate setting for a Shakespeare play with themes of exile, injustice, resistance and – ultimately – freedom and forgiveness. Overlooked by Israeli military watchtowers, and against a backdrop of graffiti (“One day the sun will rise on a free Palestine”), the British troupe struggled at times to hold the attention of the mainly young audience, nearly all of whom were seeing a Shakespeare play for the first time. Ruth Lass, whose captivating performance of Ariel was received enthusiastically, was unfazed. “You play with what’s there. In Shakespeare’s times it would have been like this. You have to work hard to hold the audience. That’s the nature of theatre,” she said. The innovative theatre company Jericho House spent a year preparing for its mini-tour, which ends on Saturday, to East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus and the mixed Israeli-Arab city of Haifa. It returns for a run at a London church on 21 September. Director Jonathan Holmes said he chose The Tempest because of the echoes its themes have in the occupied West Bank. The play “becomes a contest for territory between people of different cultures, and people of the same culture. Shakespeare uses this dynamic to explore different systems and ideas of political resistance.” The parallels were not exact, he said. “This is at one level a very English play. We’re not trying to make it overtly about the situation here. We’re offering a neutral production and we’ll see if the resonances are heard.” The first tour of a European Shakespeare production in the West Bank – at least since the British Mandate era – was mainly funded by the British Council and the Qattan Foundation. Jericho House would have liked to take the production to Gaza, but the logistical and security challenges were too great. “Cultural openness is very important in parts of the world that don’t get to travel or have exposure to other cultures,” said Holmes. No special co-ordination was made with the Israeli authorities, and three of the cast “with Middle Eastern-sounding names” were detained and questioned for several hours at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport, according to Holmes. They performed without a set, in modern dress, using few props, and without rehearsing in the selected spaces – a “high-risk” approach, according to Holmes. Finding the right venues had been tricky, he said. “The space itself has an enormous effect on the show. It’s essential to find a space that will speak as strongly as the text or performance.” The pioneering Freedom Theatre in the northern West Bank city of Jenin was on the original itinerary. But the performance was cancelled after the theatre’s director and founder, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was shot dead by masked gunmen in April . “Juliano was our principal contact,” said Holmes. “He was the one who really understood how the project would work, and he wanted it to come to the Freedom Theatre.” At the end of the performance at Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, Nancy Ijara, 18, who studied Shakespeare at school, said she particularly enjoyed the scenes of Miranda and Ferdinand’s marriage and Prospero’s forgiveness. Walid Abusrour, 49, who now lives in the US but was visiting family in Bethlehem, said: “Occupation and The Tempest are the same thing. It’s about freedom. What we’re also looking for is freedom, and to get back what we lost.” Abdelfattah Abusrour, manager of the Alrowwad cultural centre, which hosted the performance, was delighted. “For children, it was very hard to focus; it’s a lot of words in a foreign language [a summary in Arabic was given before each act]. It was challenging but the idea was to present it in a context that is powerful.” The theme of banishment, he said, “connects to our case as refugees in our own country. And we also always hope for a happy ending.” Palestinian territories William Shakespeare Israel Middle East Theatre Harriet Sherwood guardian.co.uk

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