Two Schmucks, Three Opinions

Steve Tiller, surrounded by food

A while ago, my friend Jonathan Meth got into a Facebook spat with an actor and director called Steve Tiller.  It was about Palestine - a subject about which they are both very impassioned, not least because they are both British and Jewish, in each case secular and non-Zionist.  The Facebook spat turned into three long lunches - each three hours long, in fact.  The conversations over lunch were recorded, and form the basis of a 90 minute dialogue called Two Schmucks, Three Opinions, which I witnessed at St Barnabas Church in Bethnal Green on Friday night.  And it is rather wonderful.

The evening begins with food.  I've been getting more and more interested in how food relates to theatre - we even had a restaurant as a venue for Origins - how the experience of eating together makes the exchange of ideas a simpler matter.  In this instance, the meal reflects the core of the play, and the audience become participants in the lunch that forms the springboard for the exchanges.  The conviviality of this construction is important to the play - because conviviality is its subject.  How, it asks, can the Israeli and Palestinian people live together?  Jonathan and Steve are too nuanced and sophisticated in their thinking to suggest that they have any easy answers to this most intractable of diplomatic problems - but the form they have chosen does at least go some way towards the inescapable conclusion that they need to sit down at the same table and break bread together.

I was sitting next to a young man called Ahmed, who was one of two Palestinians in the room.  As a child of 11, he had been shot by Israeli soldiers, when he and his friends were throwing stones in Gaza.  The bullet had entered his body under the rib cage, and left through his back.  He was very fortunate to have lived.  Sitting next to Ahmed, there was nothing abstract about the political ideas Jonathan and Steve discussed: he embodied their physical reality.  Without the meal and the conversation it brought, I would not have known this.

Jonathan and Steve also bring a physical reality to the discourse.  For one thing, even though they read the transcripts of their lunches, you're constantly aware that they are speaking their own words.  If you know them, you can hear the idiosyncrasies - only Jonathan could say "It's not umbilical at all".  They've left in the overlaps and unfinished interjections, the moments when they say really stupid things - they've edited the conversations but not at the expense of the messiness that characterises what people say in the thick of an impassioned debate.  I don't usually like verbatim theatre - I don't see that language is necessarily given dramatic validity by the fact that a "real person" said it - but in this case, where the parameters are very clear and where the "real people" are also theatre-makers who can structure their transcripts without losing the spontaneity, it becomes closer to a structured improvisation, and it really works.  For another thing, they begin the piece by locating the politics firmly in their own physical presences as Jewish men - Jonathan rather disconcertingly describes his circumcision at the age of 8 days at the very beginning, and you can't get much more visceral than that.

So - the politics felt very real in the room.  And the questions - horribly insoluble.  The last part of the evening passes the debate to the audience, and there was a clear sense from everyone that the need was for Israel, somehow, to change its way of thinking about the Palestinian people, to recognise them as inhabitants of the same land, to include them in a single, cross-cultural, secular state.  Is there a role for non-Israeli Jews in this, I asked them?  The answer was that they could do as they had - invite people to dinner, debate in public, open the discourse.  It's true, of course.  It's the only way.

Aftermath

LIFT continues to be very exciting. Yesterday, I was at the discussion of Theatre from the Arab World in the afternoon, and then in the evening went to see Aftermath in the Old Vic tunnels. This is an American piece, by the same team that created The Exonerated, and again makes use of verbatim testimony. The witnesses whose words are used are all refugees from Iraq, now living in Jordan, and each with a horror story to tell. It's done incredibly well, with lots of humour, warmth, and humanity. The acting is very compelling, without being totally naturalistic - you are always aware that this is an actor relaying somebody else's words, particularly since much play is made of the translator, who was presumably present at all the interviews. The actors speak in English almost all the time - but he is always there and is frequently told to translate.

I often don't like verbatim theatre, because it's often undramatic and preachy. This was neither. My other concern about verbatim remains, however. In bringing us close to the psychology, the humanity of these victims, it loses sight of the wider political structures which caused this suffering in the first place. Even a play like Talking to Terrorists, which engaged with the "bad" side, rather than the "victims", reduced terrorism to a psychological aberration.

The Illegals

I was at the Rich Mix last night (London's most car-park like venue), to see a piece called The Illegals, presented by the Actors for Human Rights branch of Ice and Fire. It's a company with which we have a lot in common - so as much as anything I was glad to see them in action.

The play is verbatim theatre, based on interviews with "illegal immigrants". I'm not a great fan of verbatim as a form - just because somebody "real" has said something, it doesn't instantly become valid as dramatic dialogue - but this piece was skillfully composed from five very intense personal stories, intercut with quotations from the likes of Jackie Smith, John Reid, and the Border Agency. The collage effect was what gave it the artistry - official lines juxtaposed with human truths to make a very clear and powerful political point.

The actor who'd invited me, Jeremy Tiang, speaks the words of a Chinese man who came to England for economic reasons, and works in Chinese restaurants for incredibly low wages, in constant fear of the police, while sending money home for his children's schooling. The loneliness which came through was very touching. Then there's an Egyptian driver, whose passport has been with the Home Office for two years, so he can't even leave the country(!), a political refugee from Ethiopia who went underground when the authorities refused to recognise the nature of his persecution; and a woman with a similar case from Ecuador, who cleans toilets all night for a pittance. The last case is a woman from Guatemala, who was deported because she had too little money. As always, the border controls favour the rich. It's only poor people who have problems moving around.

Practice as research

I've spent the last three weeks at Central, working with second year students on the PA course. These are not acting students (although some of them are rather good actors), but people who want to be writers, producers, directors, theatre-makers in new forms. Central, rather sensibly, doesn't offer courses in these specific disciplines, because it thinks students are too young to undertake these roles so specifically. Instead, this course is about opening them up to possibilities.


So, undertaking a residency with them is a great opportunity for Border Crossings and for me. They are flexibly creative, and excited about new ways of doing things. They also don't have anything to prove as performers, and as a result are less likely to be scared of looking stupid. I decided to work on some verbatim material, with a political edge to it. When I mentioned this to Nick Williams, our Arts Council officer, he said "That's a bit of a departure for you, isn't it?". In some ways, I suppose it is. But our work is always related to political realities, and is often fuelled by political energy. And very often the devised material starts from something documentary. If it feels like it's a million miles from what we've usually done, it's because I'd not previously found ways of theatricalising the documentary - I dislike the verbatim cliches of people pretending to be - say - Jack Straw. It makes it all seem too petty.

So I was delighted with this period of experiment, which allowed us to find ways of presenting documentary material without making it feel like a personal dig at anybody, and while endowing it with a vital and telling theatricality. We were able to work with movement and music, combining dance with documentary, as well as with video and agit-prop, with recorded and live voices, even with humour. I'm sure this will re-surface in future devised work. Great to be able to research like this and call it teaching. But the best teaching is learning really, I think.

Quartet: A Journey North

I saw this Iranian production at the Barbican last night. It's the second of their Iranian season I've caught, and much more exciting than last week's rather under-powered Daedalus and Icarus. Quartet: A Journey North is the work of Amir Reza Koohestani and his company Mehr: I really liked his piece Amid the Clouds at the Royal Court a while back. This time, his love of narration and the need to avoid any physical contact between actors for cultural reasons is taken to a new extreme. In the Pit space, the audience is seated on four sides, with one actor at a desk facing each side, narrating very intimately. You can't even see the actor who faces the opposite side, and you get limited views of the two on adjacent sides. However, each actor is facing directly into a video camera, and they have screens above their heads, so you can see the face of the speaker, as well as footage which locates the play in the Iranian landscape. It sounds odd, but in fact it serves to draw you in to an incredibly intense level of performance. Even in Persian. The screens, of course, are the ideal solution to the surtitle problem.

This may depend a bit on where you're sitting. I was facing a performer called Mahin Sadri, who is also the co-author of the piece. It's based on a documentary film she made about an Iranian murderer - so oddly resonant for me at the moment, as I work with Central students on a verbatim piece about a killer. Mahin is an astonishing performer, and the intimacy of the presentation makes her feel very real, very immediate. It's a huge shock when, towards the end, she simply stands up and walks away, while her screen avatar remains talking. You realise that they've switched to pre-recorded footage - but the shift away from the live is so subtle that it reminds you how deeply we care about liveness, and how close our current society is to losing it.