Last week, Palestinian director Faisal Abu Alhayjaa wrote on Facebook about his house being attacked by the Israeli army, his brother being arrested and dragged out in front of his children. Alhayjaa had just returned from an India tour of his Indo-Palestinian co-production, Hamesha Saamida, co-directed with Sudhanva Deshpande. It was business as usual for the forces of occupation. Although his brother was later released, it cast in sharp relief the immediacy of conflict still collectively experienced in the West Bank. It feeds back into Alhayjaa’s work with The Freedom Theatre, a group trying to build a brand of stout-hearted cultural resistance, even with their backs to the wall. The Indian tour was a triumph of amity and concord. However, things haven’t gone down too well for another play, The Seige , about the 39-day seige of Bethlehem’s Church of Nativity in 2002. The production’s efforts to open at New York’s Public Theatre in May have been quashed; a decision unsurprisingly cloaked with tight-lipped reticence from the venue’s board.
Theatre of war, and of healing, strikes a chord no matter where your affiliations lie, even if it sometimes sits uneasily on the cusp between enabling the voiceless to speak and the raising of the bogey of counter-information. Those of us at a comfortable distance can gingerly sift through the evidence, finding a counterpoint to every assertion, striving to be ‘balanced’ in our reading of conflict elsewhere. This is a luxury often not available to those on the ground, and you have to choose one side: your own. Some of the world’s most troubling conflicts have come to us via theatre this year. There was Mohit Takalkar’s Urdu retelling of Palestinian Amir Nizar Zuabi’s I Am Yusuf and This Is My Brother . There was also Ruwanthie de Chickera’s Dear Children, Sincerely …, Chickera’s work, especially, is powerful just in the very act of its telling. Both Rwanda and Sri Lanka have deep wounds inflicted by decades of ethnic conflict. It is designed as a conversation across generations. Each decade of strife has been presented as a theatrical set-piece punctuated by nuggets of oral history. Voices of those who may have lived through it have been used, those that still carry the guilt of bearing witness to forgotten episodes of egregious human savagery. As in Hamesha Saamida , much of this unearthing is through the most simplistic rendering of historical sign-posts. These watered-down narratives are perhaps the stumbling blocks to be expected after years and years of obfuscation. In the case of Alhayjaa’s piece, it was an act of resistance in itself, as spontaneous as the throwing of a stone at an Israeli tank.
What elevates Dear Children, Sincerely … is the boundless feral energy of its mixed ensemble composed of actors from both countries. In devised work, it is very often the joie de vivre of performers that breathes life and character into a bare-bones account. We are served rape and genocide, and Rwanda’s ethnic-cleansing flows seamlessly into the more familiar Sinhalese-Tamil turmoil. But in all of this, there is also the resilience of a people looking to rebound after each calamity. This optimism appeared to be severed from Takalkar’s play, weighed down by the misery it seeks to represent in unalloyed fashion.
In Chickera’s piece, the voices remind us quietly that everything will pass. Hope in the face of futility can be dismissed as indulgence. But in works such as this that seek to heal, it is part of a compelling, even cathartic, retelling.
The author is a theatre critic and a freelance writer
