Welcome to Ramallah

It might have been worse, I suppose: “Welcome to Scunthorpe;” or even “Welcome to Dalston,” the vibrant but slightly alarming neighbourhood around the Arcola where this creaky four-hander is playing in the tiny studio (before visiting the Theatre Royal, York, at the end of October) while Small Craft Warnings continues in the main space.

Welcome to Ramallah, presented by iceandfire, is written by Sonja Linden and Adah Kay; the latter lived and worked in the West Bank with her late husband during the recent Israeli re-occupation of Ramallah, with its curfews, electricity cuts, intimidating barrier and sudden explosions.

Adah’s Zionist convictions obviously took a bit of a pasting. The pain of the Jewish experience is replaced in the play by guilt at the outcome; “we are the Jews now” says Daoud, a lithely attractive married Palestinian from the same spot in Galilee where two Jewish sisters – Mara, who is training English teachers in Ramallah, and her visiting sister, Nat, from Cleveland, Ohio – hope to bury the ashes of their father.

Those ashes are stowed in a Fortnum and Mason tea tin. But not for long. During the course of a night of argument and recrimination in Mara’s flat, she and Nat discover that their father, who founded a kibbutz at the end of the British Mandate, might have been responsible for some unpleasant acts of displacement himself. A lot more than just beans are spilt.

Nat has breezed in, prejudices intact, with cheesecake from Jerusalem, while Mara’s friend Daoud – who has given her a present of ethnic earrings – has an old uncle in tow, proud old Salim (grave and gravelly-voiced John Moraitis), who remembers the evictions in the new state of Israel. The evening is loud with the sound of ticked boxes and a pro-Palestinian bias.

Sue Weston’s production makes clever use of a limited area but cannot disguise the awkward jumps between points being made, or the dull writing of Shuna Snow’s painfully well-meaning Mara and Lolly Susi’s brusquely certain (but too soon disenchanted) Nat. Christopher Simon exudes a smouldering dignity as Daoud, and the production’s best moments come when he and Mr Moraitis drop their quaintly inflected “foreign” accents for an inflamed dialogue in their own tongue, ie fluent English.

-Michael Coveney