This is not a political show, Yousef Sweid announces at the outset, despite the provocation of its title and the heap of protest banners on stage. Sweid, an Israeli Palestinian living in Berlin, is just here to talk about his divorce, he says.
The Israel-Palestine conflict can’t help but raise its head nonetheless in Isabella Sedlak and Sweid’s play, staged at Edinburgh last year. Sweid is a Christian Arab Palestinian who grew up in Haifa with an Israeli passport and friends on either side of the divide. He is divorcing his second wife, who is Israeli, and has children who are half-Jewish Berliners with Austrian blood from descendants of the Holocaust.
So he really is caught, if not between the river and the sea, then certainly between contested lands and identities. A charming presence on stage, he leads with humour and lightness of touch, despite being in a custody battle with his wife who wants to take their child back to Israel.
He plays out conversations with his divorce lawyer in Berlin, but is pulled back to childhood, with memories of a father who urges him to “take a stand”, a Jewish child who calls him a “stinky Arab” at kindergarten, Jewish Israeli girlfriends who love his Arabness, others who brand him a Hamas-loving threat for it. There are jokes about the IDF and about changing his name to a Jewish variation to fit in.
The play is an attempt to explore the area between mutual suspicion and hate, where understanding, maybe even empathy and fellowship, might blossom. So it swerves away from seeing conflict in black and white, letting disagreements hang, unspoken, unresolved. Sweid voices his parents, friends, girlfriends, which is sometimes confusing but offers multiple views. He switches languages to reflect his in-between state, from English to Hebrew, Arabic and German.
The show takes some time to arrive at its nub: the pressure someone like Sweid feels to take a stance, especially after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed. It stays blithe for perhaps too long but gathers force as it becomes more serious. The reluctance to take sides seems like a withholding of sympathy, both to the Jewish friend who knew several people murdered on 7 October, and his Palestinian friend whose friends have been sexually abused by Israeli soldiers and neighbours arrested for no given reason.
Maybe this is what the in-between space looks like, the play suggests. In order to connect, the withholding of a final “for-me-or-against-me?” judgment is key. The utopia is no borders, he says, and leaves it there.
• At the Royal Court theatre, London, until 9 May.
