Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea

Put together from scratch in three weeks by a mixed British and Arab company, Go To Gaza, Drink The Sea
is less a play and more an act of mourning. It is clumsy in places,
incomplete, staggeringly partisan – and one of the most honest
performances I have seen for some time. The London fringe has many
wonderful things about it. It also has many plays by recent university
graduates with trust funds, wanting to learn their craft before a
minimal, and minimally interested, audience. This piece of work is the
very opposite of that, a passionate, angry company with something
urgent to communicate about how it feels to be Palestinian today.

Writer / directors Ahmed Masoud and Justin Butcher string together a
number of true-life tragedies from the recent Israeli bombardment of
Gaza, interspersed with news footage and traditional Palestinian music
(beautifully performed by Nizar Al-Issa). Mostly it is unbearable. At
first it is unbearable because the levels of audience manipulation seem
so great: endless photos of dead babies, scary bomb blasts when you
least expect them, a father clutching his maimed child’s teddy bear in
a scene which feels straight out of Drop The Dead Donkey.

As it progresses relentlessly, it starts to be unbearable because, regardless of the politics, civilian death on that scale is
unbearable. The show made me feel powerless – and for that reason if
for no other I salute the makers for turning their own sense of
powerlessness into something so sincere, so swiftly. We really do need
more theatre like this.

There are other things to salute: a gorgeous, atmospheric
installation-like setting, physically and emotionally engaging
performances from a well-connected ensemble. On the other hand the
artful lack of a balanced political landscape is infuriating. Hamas is
portrayed as a wholly noble resistance movement born solely of
necessity. There is one monologue from an imprisoned Israeli refusenik
– other than that, the only Israeli voice we hear is that of Alan
Dershowitz, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, and, more famously,
legal defender both of OJ Simpson and of the US’s use of torture during
the Gulf War.

Jane Frere’s extraordinary set, sculptural piles of shoes that
stretch to the ceiling, does something to add some depth of context,
bringing to mind, among other things, the piles of shoes in Auschwitz.
But this work does not seem interested in being a measured and
forward-looking consideration of recent politics. The time for that
will hopefully come; for now, we have a howl of pain for the
Palestinian dead. To review it in the conventional sense is as bizarre
and inappropriate as reviewing a funeral. I hated it. And I urge you to
go.

-Sarah Chew