I Am Yusuf and This is My Brother

Synopsis

'Before it happened I didn't know those people existed. Now I'm not certain that we do...' January 1948. Palestine. The British Mandate is ending. The UN is voting on who will control what part of the land... Ali is in love with Nada - but he is in despair. Her father won't let them marry because his brother Yusuf is 'odd' with his own eccentric, child-like point of view. War begins. As the villagers are scattered and become refugees, the secret that's kept Ali and Nada apart is revealed.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 22 January 2010

Plays that talk magically these days of political strife and upheaval are rare, and ones that bear such tidings from the Middle East even rarer, so this remarkable collaboration between the newly founded theatre company ShiberHur from Haifa and the Young Vic is doubly welcome.

There’s a mystery, and a riddle, at the heart of it. Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play counterpoints the chaos in the wake of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1948 with the siege of Ramallah in 2000 in the story of separated lovers, and the brother of one of them.

That brother is Yusuf, “not all there” as we said years ago, and he’s first seen being urged to take a bath by his brother’s young lover, now old. The stage is covered in a huge tarpaulin canopy that lifts and heaves with the action, sur-titles projected on the bath and two small hovering screens.

The subsequent irony of actors straining to speak in English to an audience whose forebears landed th...

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