There’s little doubt which side of the political spectrum Itai Erdal is on and the strength of his bleak, anti-war play about the Arab-Israeli conflict lies in his straight-from-the-shoulder approach.
A former Israeli soldier, the Jerusalem-born actor-playwright Erdal, 49, is the artistic director of the Elbow Theatre in Vancouver, where he has spent the second half of his life. It is from there that he starts the action in a barber’s shop run by Abed Slewa, a deserter from the Iraqi army with whom Erdal has formed a close relationship; though, given his equally close relationship with Slewa’s cut-throat razor, it is one in which he is wary of “exposing” himself as being Israeli.
From there the action leaps around from a fondly remembered Jerusalem – where Erdal used to eat freshly picked figs and mulberries on his way to school – and a throbbing, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv on to his vividly depicted three years of mandatory military service including stints in southern Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories (or Palestine, as Erdal refers to it); while also taking in the Holocaust via blackly comic teenage jokes and faded photos of lost relatives and the creation of Israel in 1948 (or the “nakba” (catastrophe) as the Palestinians refer to it and their displacement and dispossession during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. And that’s not forgetting the preceding 3,500-plus years of the holy, disputed (or should that be “wholly disputed”?) land, neatly illustrated by Erdal waving the multifarious flags of its present and past rulers.
If it seems crammed full, at times to bursting point, it’s merely reflecting a complicated backdrop. Jerusalem, as he says, has been attacked more than 50 times over the centuries. So, though he doesn’t say it, one would have to be a super-optimist to expert a perfect peace any time soon.
The stage is covered in an abstract map of the Middle East, created by the scenic painter Brian Ball, also from Vancouver, and peopled by three sizes of soldier figurines, with the biggest ones representing Yochi and Rafael, a right-wing and left-wing soldier respectively, and Avi, their commanding officer, all of whom are played by Erdal. The mid-sized ones feature in an emotionally taut checkpoint scene involving an elderly Palestinian woman with a feverish baby, while there are also twenty blocks of non-speaking toy soldiers.
Emad Armoush, 58, a Syrian musician-composer from Vancouver, accompanies the psychologically intense action with evocative harmonies on the guitar and oud.
It is a pained, impassioned lament to the land Erdal loves and its frank, unfiltered views will upset and incense many who will charge it with being one-sided. “Today in Israel there are many people who are proudly and openly racist … We know what it is like to be discriminated against, but we made a country that discriminates against others,” Erdal inveighs.
At one point, he appears with a sub-machinegun. “I felt really self-conscious walking around with a big gun. It felt horrible pointing it at a child: sometimes you could see the horror in the child’s face,” he says. His anguish and sense of guilt at being complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians, as he sees it, is palpable. For all his left-wing, peace-loving sentiments and his mother’s advice that he could be a decent, humane soldier and a counterbalance to right-wingers, once he puts on the uniform he recognises that, in the eyes of the Palestinians, he becomes indistinguishable from the others, like the toy soldiers.
While Erdal mentions his uncircumcised eight month-old son – his mother is not Jewish, he explains – the fulcrum of the play is provided by the experience of Ido, his nephew, who at the age of eight returned home from school one day with an empty box to be filled for soldiers on the front lines. Inside it the teacher had written: “To the soldiers of today from the soldiers of tomorrow.” For Erdal it’s a conflict seemingly without end. He tells how he tried to dissuade Ido from serving in the army and explains some of the more elaborate ways it can be achieved. He failed.
Soldiers of Tomorrow Old Lab, Summerhall, until 27 August
