Depending on interpretation, the slogan that gives this work its title is either a passionate plea for Palestinian liberation or an antisemitic call for the obliteration of Israel. But don’t worry, Yousef Sweid tells us at the start of a chatty, unpolished, hour-long slice of autobiographical stand-up theatre: he doesn’t want to talk about the Hamas atrocities of July 7 or Israel’s subsequent brutal obliteration of Gaza, but about his divorce.
Sweid is an impishly charming Palestinian actor and an Israeli citizen, born into an Arab Christian family in Haifa and now living in Berlin, the father of a grown up son and an infant daughter by his two Jewish exes. His very existence is proof that, between the political extremes, there is a zone where ethnicities, beliefs and allegiances blur, and where people generally just want to be left alone to rub along (or have sex) together.
Jewish girls found his Arab-ness hot, and vice versa. In Berlin he gravitates to hipster coffee bars rather than Palestinian grocers. The performer in him is seduced by the idea of becoming a double or triple agent after a possibly fantastical approach by Israel’s intelligence services.
Audiences may empathise with his reluctance to take a stand or pick a side in the seemingly endless and unsolvable conflict, and swoon at his evocations of fecund kibbutz orchards and Ramallah beer festivals. Perverse as it may seem, this is a work chiefly full of amusement, affection and exasperation about the way Arabs and Jews interact inside and outside of their contentiously shared land, rather than a polemic.
But now his latest ex wants to take their daughter back to Israel: the personal can’t help but become the political. Towards the end, horrors perpetrated by both Hamas and the IDF clamour to be heard. How could they not?
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Co-written and directed by Isabella Sedlak, the show was originally staged at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It is deliberately rough-and-ready and reliant on 49-year-old Sweid’s personal warmth and his grizzle-bearded sexiness. There’s a microphone to one side of the stage and a chair covered in banners and signs supposedly collected from protests that he attended, or that interrupted his work (a TV series about Mossad he appeared in, for instance).
He flits from one to the other to portray his father – resident in Canada due to tax fraud – and his son, boisterous schoolmates and cooing women. But he’s happiest front and centre, bashfully flirting and sharing both past trysts and the intimacies of fatherhood. The show works best when he’s joshing, digressing and confessing: when things get serious it becomes instantly moribund. Occasional stumbles are part of the package (English must be, what, his fourth language?). So is a certain queasiness: how much of what he is telling us about his ex is true, or fair?
Flawed and basic as this is, though, it’s a masterful piece of programming. Since 1956 the Royal Court has been an ostensibly political, broadly left wing theatre. It is expected to “take a stand”, even though rapid, knee-jerk reactions to contemporary issues is something that a slow, collaborative artform like theatre rarely does well.
And then there’s the elephant in the room. Since the last-minute cancellation of Jim Allen’s 1987 play Perdition, which discussed supposed collusion between Nazis and Zionists in 1944, the Court has periodically faced allegations of overt or covert antisemitism.
The still newish artistic director David Byrne tackled the issue head-on by showcasing Giant, Mark Rosenblatt’s hit play about Roald Dahl’s virulent prejudice against Jews, in his opening 2024 season. And it’s a further shrewd move by him to insert this quick-hit take on the Israel-Palestine conflict into the Court’s 70th anniversary programming.
The confrontational title deflects into warm, fuzzy anecdotage about how life could be better if we all just go along. It’s banal, yes: but the ongoing alternative is worse.
To 9 May, royalcourttheatre.com.
