Why does Romeo have to be Palestinian and Juliet Israeli, I asked
myself when first reading that the famous Shakespearean play about
this young cou¬ple will be coproduced by the Khan and the
El-Qasaba theaters in Jerusalem? While watching the performance of
Romeo and Juliet in the large hall for¬merly used by the
Israeli Electric Corporation located behind the Jerusalem railway
station, which had been transformed into an impressive theatrical
arena for this occasion, the question about the casting constantly
came back.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is first of all a play about
stereotypes and about the long-standing and deeply rooted hatred
and strife between two families living in the city of Verona. The
blooming love between Romeo and Juliet is destroyed by the fatal
combination of these stereotypes and by the enmity between the two
families. Because of deeply-rooted prejudices their love is doomed
before it can begin to bloom.
I am sure that the two directors, Fuad Awad (from El-Qasaba
Theater) and Eran Baniel (from the Khan Theater), as well as the
members of the impressive Palestinian and Israeli casts and the
other artists who have con¬tributed to this complex
production, have been deeply aware of these issues in their work.
According to reports in the Israeli press the rehearsals frequently
had to be interrupted because of both political and economic
difficulties, which are really two sides of the same coin. Finally,
however it was possible to present this coproduction in Jerusalem
as well as in sev¬eral places in Europe, among them the
Festival of the City of Lille in France which was one of its main
sponsors. From this point of view the copro¬duction of Romeo
and Juliet is a success story.
However, Shakespeare's play is also an extremely complex work of
art, overflowing with beautiful love poetry which has to be
carefully analyzed and investigated when a work of this kind, in
the city of Jerusalem, is pre¬sented in the year 1994 with
Palestinians and Israelis. Is this poetry able to throw any new
light on the issues which we are living with every day? And what
does the young couple represent in this specific context?
Ultimately, the casting of Romeo with a Palestinian actor (Khalifa
Natur) and Juliet with an Israeli actress (Orna Katz), even if they
in many ways play their parts very well, says nothing unexpected
about the ideological, the political and the cultural conflicts in
the contemporary city of Jerusalem. It merely reproduces the
different hegemonic power structures as they have developed since
1967, as seen from an Israeli perspective.
Additional Significance
What I mean is that Israelis are frequently exposed in different
ways to Palestinian men. The latter appear as workers, as
politicians who are much more exposed in the media now than before,
and as terrorists. The perfor¬mance reproduces this
socioeconomic stereotype without questioning it. In this production
the Palestinian Romeo is just a nice guy, but nothing more. On the
other hand, I cannot, of course, say exactly what an Israeli woman
represents for a Palestinian, and what it means to fall in love
with one. From an Israeli perspective, however, this casting is
somehow more stereo¬typical than the opposite situation.
It would somehow have been much more interesting for me as an
Israeli to have seen a Palestinian Juliet. When Joshua Sobol placed
Samira, a Palestinian woman, in the central role of his 1984 play
Shooting Magda (in Hebrew it is actually called
Ha-Palestinait), the fact that she was at the same time both
Palestinian and a woman had a very strong effect on the stage. And
it could perhaps have been interesting for a Palestinian to see an
Israeli Romeo, who is neither a soldier nor a settler.
I am not arguing that the casting was wrong. What I feel is rather
that all those things we usually take for granted had not really
been problematized in this performance. The acting did not draw our
attention to how we per¬ceive each other, nor did the
production as a whole confront this actively. They were just taken
for granted, like all the other minor details in Jerusalem which in
fact represent Israeli hegemony.
Take for example the associations which the hall of the Israeli
Electric Corporation has for a Palestinian; what does it say with
regard to power, in particular here in Jerusalem. During the
performance this thought, for me as an Israeli, made me feel a
little uncomfortable in this particular con¬text. Because, in
the end, the play had nothing important to say about what seemed
obvious. Except for a few stones suddenly cast onto the stage, it
just ignored these issues. And even these stones were anonymously
thrown onto the stage (as if the stones in the Intifada were not
thrown by hands). The performance says nothing about this and about
the Palestinian struggle for independence and the official Israeli
reaction to the struggle.
In Jerusalem, we have for better or for worse been forced to accept
that almost everything has an additional significance. To watch a
performance in a hall belonging to the Israeli Electric Corporation
is not a neutral feature. As a result of this, in the Khan and
El-Qasaba production, the tragic love story between Romeo and
Juliet has become almost completely privatized; it has become a
human interest story in one of the weekly newspaper
sup¬plements.
Also the choice of costumes, a kind of antiquated Renaissance
clothing, which literally have the smell of theater storage rooms,
and the abstract but rather clumsy blocks of scenery filling the
large hall, somehow fail to make us understand why Jerusalem is a
city of conflict and strife, and why the cooperation of the two
theaters is so important. The very beginning of the performance,
when all the members of the cast harmoniously line up and sing in
front of the spectators, is indeed a very touching moment. But when
the performance is over we know very little about what they feel
has gone wrong in the city.
Neither Dangerous Nor Daring
For me, these issues are symptomatic of the production as a whole.
The use of languages in the performance, although it has been
solved from a prac¬tical point of view, is another issue which
does not expose anything at all about what is really at stake
ideologically. In the performance, the Palestinians, who represent
the members of the Montague household, speak Arabic between
themselves, while the Israelis, from the house of Capulet, speak in
Hebrew. When the actors speak in Arabic the text is pro¬jected
in Hebrew above the playing area, while Arabic is projected when
Hebrew is spoken. But why do the actors mostly speak in Hebrew when
members of the two families meet or when they confront each other?
Is it, in the negative sense, an unintentional, or perhaps even a
conscious reflec¬tion of the painful realities of the conflict
itself?
The fact that Israelis usually do not speak Arabic, and as a rule
in differ¬ent ways they take for granted that Palestinians
manage in Hebrew, is reproduced in the performance itself without
any further reflection. It is, in a way, just like some of the
official application forms used by the Military Administration in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which are only issued in
Hebrew. And the Romeo and Juliet performance, even if the
text is projected in translation on a screen above the stage when
the "other" lan¬guage is spoken, too naively grants a
hegemonic status to Hebrew. This is continued at a time when the
deeply rooted hierarchies have to be criticized, or at least
questioned, in order to be able to bring about a real change of the
political realities.
One of the goals of the theater, at least when it deals directly
with politi¬cal issues of this kind, as I believe the two
directors intended for their pro¬duction of Romeo and
Juliet to do, is to "shock" the spectators to such an extent
that they will be able to see something which they have never
real¬ly been able to see before. Political theater has to be
dangerous and daring. And in order to be that, it is not enough to
bring actors from the two peo¬ples together and to present a
bilingual performance.
Responding to Oppression
I have seen productions of classic plays which are in themselves
not directly dealing with the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians, which through their casting and choice of languages
have been both choking and liberat¬ing at the same time. In
1985, Ilan Ronen directed Waiting for Godot, prob¬ably Samuel
Beckett's most famous play, at the Haifa Municipal Theater. In this
production, the two clownish characters, Didi and Gogo, waiting for
the mysterious Godot who never arrives, were played in Arabic by
two Israeli Palestinian actors, Yussuf Abu-Warda and Makram Khouri.
The tree standing in the center of the stage, as the directions of
Beckett's prescribe, had been transformed into a half-finished pole
at a building site, while Didi and Gogo had become Palestinian
workers waiting for not only the myste¬rious Godot, who does
not show up, but also for a solution to their national
problem.
When I saw this production in the over-crowded hall of the
Al-Hakawati Theater in Jerusalem, performed for a predominantly
Palestinian audience, there was virtually every conceivable kind of
electricity in the air. The per¬formance had become an
outright challenge to what both Israelis and Palestinians, each one
from their own individual perspective, seemed to be taking for
granted at that time. The Palestinians in this production were not
just workers; they were in fact also waiting for something to
appear from some metaphysical realm, which on some level they were
too confused really to define or to grasp.
Similar emotions were no doubt triggered when the Al-Hakawati
Theater itself performed its first productions in the beginning of
the 1980s. It is, of course, hard to estimate how profoundly these
performances affected the audiences in Jerusalem and in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, that is, when they were not
censored by the Military Administration, sometimes a few minutes
before they were supposed to begin.
By working on the basis of the local storytelling traditions, the
Al¬-Hakawati company, consisting of young and politically
radical actors, developed an acting style on the basis of which
they were able not only to respond to the oppression of their
people but also to oppose it. But very lit¬tle of this
particular aesthetic and ideological experience can be discerned in
the present production of Romeo and Juliet, even if there are
certain points where this form of acting no doubt could have been
applied. I am referring to, for example, Mercutio's famous speech
to Queen Mab, which is a kind of folk-tale, about the fatal effects
of love.
Since Mercutio is one of Romeo's friends, this character is played
by a Palestinian actor, Muhammad Bakri, who is well-known among
Israelis and Palestinians for his work on stage and screen, both in
Arabic and in Hebrew. When Bakri, who was born in Israel, in a
village in the Galilee, and whose training is Israeli, performs
Mercutio, his acting becomes what could be termed dramatic. He
performs the character of Mercutio in an "Israeli" manner, instead
of telling his story in the mode of Palestinian storytelling.
A Theatrical Postcard
The 1994 production of Romeo and Juliet unfortunately leads merely
to a polite approval: that performances like this could be
important, that per¬haps a new era has started with the mutual
recognition between the PLO and Israel, and that it is therefore
"nice" (in the kitschy sense of the word) to do something
together.
In many ways, the play functions exactly like the polite handshake
of offi¬cial recognition, unable to confront the burning
issues themselves. On the stage, this kind of "handshake"
transforms the Shakespearean tragedy into a melodrama, but the
greater problem is that what we see on the stage adds almost
nothing to what we already know about these polite, and
some¬times even forced, handshakes. This, I'm sorry to say, is
what this theatri¬cal postcard from the ongoing peace process
finally looks like.
