Two Plays For Gaza @ The Hackney Empire 21st May

 

This gala presentation of speakers and theatre was presented at the Hackney Empire as a benefit for the Gaza Music School and Stop the War Coalition.  It was done in the best intentions but there were some significant flaws that detracted from the quality of what was on show.

 

The first half ran really quickly, the audience being greeted pre-show with some swinging overtures from the Freylekh Klezmer Dance Band and Jane Shallice was a superb compere, and smoothly guided proceedings throughout.

 

Tony Benn, former MP, was the first to speak and he delivered a brilliant and gently humorous take on the current situation, attacking the use of religion to justify war.  He took hilarious and well-appreciated swings at Bush and Blair, but more pertinent was his historical references, recalling how Hitler took advantage of the 1920s economic slump to propel himself to power.  His point was war and recession go hand in hand, and that everything is interconnected and we cannot let history repeat itself.

 

Another highlight of the first half was Ben Griffin, an ex-SAS serviceman who served in the Iraq War.  He said he had been gagged from talking about his experiences, so his testimony came from A.N Other, generating laughter.  Griffin spoke of the increasingly savage instructions soldiers received from his chain of command during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the subsequent murder of numerous Iraqi civilians and the debilitating psychological effects upon the soldiers.

 

Caryl Churchill's play "Seven Jewish Children" closed the first half, and it was a brilliantly succinct and poetic piece about the illusions fostered by an older Israeli generation upon their young. 

 

The second half kicked off with rapper and Stop the War regular Lowkey.  Lowkey's style was a perfect fit for the Hackney Empire, and his poems on Palestine and police brutality packed a memorable punch.  There were times, however, when technique got in the way of content.  His poem "Alphabet Assassin", with it's rapid-fire alliteration, was incomprehensible to me and drowned out what he was trying to say.

 

After Lowkey's powerhouse performance, the play that came after, "The Trainer" by David Wilson and Anne Aylor, felt like a prolonged anti-climax and made the second half far too long.  The piece ran at least an hour and the night had already started late.  The actors in both plays, reading off the playscript, weren't miced up like the speakers and it was a struggle in the dress circle to hear what they were saying.  As a result, some audience members were quite audibly exhausted and a number of them left before the play had ended.

 

"The Trainer" was a less engaging piece than the previous play, cutting incohesively between two plot strands: the love story between a Palestinian gym trainer and a Jewish activist, and the plight of composer Keith Burstein who sues a prominent newspaper reviewer after she trashes his opera about suicide bombers.  There were some good insights about the media and people's sometimes arrogant and insular attitudes towards the conflict, and there were some fine performances by the actors, particularly Jana Zeineddine as the trainer Taghreed and Paul Herzberg as Burstein, but the play does not have anything new and substantial to say about Israel and Palestine and this is ultimately what dragged it down.