Promised landing - Amir Nizar Zuabi interview

Published on Friday 1 August 2008 17:32

Amir Nizar Zuabi may be directing the National Theatre of Palestine, but he tells Mark Fisher why he prefers audiences to see the dreamlike poetry in his work rather than political drama

NEXT time you hear someone's travel horror story, spare a thought for Amir Nizar Zuabi. As a Palestinian living in Jerusalem, he knows the simplest journey can become an ordeal. We meet in Edinburgh, where he is on a reconnaissance trip to check out the Royal Lyceum before the arrival of his Jidariyya at the Edinburgh International Festival. It's the briefest of visits, but that doesn't mean he's been able to avoid a full three hours of searches and security checks in Israel before being personally escorted on to the plane.

What is more remarkable is that the handsome 31-year-old director shrugs it off as just one of those things. It is only what he has come to expect as one of Israel's 1.5 million Arabs, representing 20% of the population, and he knows there are greater hardships to bear.

In any case, there is a different message he wants to get across. Although he is coming to the EIF as the director of a show from the National Theatre of Palestine ("a big title for a very small theatre"), he would rather his work was discussed in terms of its artistry than of its political background.

Wherever Jidariyya has been performed abroad – in Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Paris – audiences have leapt to the assumption that the play is some kind of expression of Palestinian self-determination. But it's not. Zuabi is only too aware of the politically charged context in which he is working, it's just that he is not trying to score points in Jidariyya.

"The show becomes much more political outside Palestine," he says. "At home, Palestinians don't get excited by the fact we're Palestinians and they're not looking for the political angle, so it becomes about the richness of language and culture.

"Abroad, people ask me what it means politically, because if you're Palestinian it has to have a political meaning. I don't want to be defined by the fact that I come from a battle zone. Palestinians are richer than that. My grandmother was Palestinian before she had problems with Israel. It's shrinking your culture to one thing, and it's richer than that."

The challenge Zuabi finds more interesting is to create European-style theatre in a culture where poetry is the dominant mode of artistic expression. Professional theatre in Palestine did not really exist before the 1970s, so its history is still being written.

"Theatre in Palestine is not taken for granted," he says. "It's not part of the culture. The big tradition in the Arabic world is poetry. There is an enormous amount of Arabic poetry that is very good, very rich and, still today, very popular. I can't imagine any poet in the west who could fill a 6,000-seater by just standing and reading a poem. Even our visual arts come from the language in the form of calligraphy. Language is incorporated into the way Arabs look at the world, and for me that was the link to Jidariyya, which is a theatrical adaptation of a poem."

Born in the Galilee and now living in Palestinian-dominated East Jerusalem, Zuabi trained as an actor in an Israeli arts school before turning his hand to directing. He worked for Ramallah's Al Kasaba Theatre and spent a year at London's Young Vic in 2003-4, as well as a stint at the Teatro Colosseo in Rome. It was while he was in London that he read Mahmoud Darwish's Jidariyya, the 100-page poem from which the play takes its title.

"I read it, and it was as if somebody had smacked me across the face," he says. "I was gobsmacked. For a year I couldn't let go. It's not a play that's built like a dramatic story, but as a theatre director, when you read something that touches you so deeply, you know you need to do something."

Darwish, a leading Palestinian poet and human rights activist, suffered a heart attack in 1999. The shock of surgery forced him to consider his place on the Earth, compelling him to write movingly about life, death and the immortal power of poetry. "It's about a man on his deathbed, reckoning with his life, language, culture. This poet holds together such a rich texture of Palestinian culture: poetry from the great Islamic era, from Christian literature, the Old Testament, Walt Whitman and Heidegger. This country has always been a corridor; everybody passes through and leaves his residue."

Together with collaborator Khalifa Natour, Zuabi began imagining how this "painfully personal" poem, with its allusions to Gilgamesh, Ecclesiastes and Kierkegaard, could be adapted for the stage. Their solution was to create a piece that combined the Palestinian love of language with a visual aesthetic. "The poem is very metaphysical and that would have been useless on the stage," he says. "But a man confronting his death is a very heightened moment. It's a full-on battle between a man and his prospects of dying."

Staying true to the poem's shape while giving it a theatrical structure, the show brings to life the old poet and his younger self. Six further actors take on the roles of nurses, lovers and immigrants returning from the land of the dead. With a set designed by Zuabi himself, it features what one critic called "disturbingly bizarre visual effects vividly reminiscent of the work of Ren Magritte".

"It's very dreamlike because the poem is a trip," says Zuabi. "My audience is sometimes people who are seeing theatre for the first time in their lives, so it was crucial that it had a locomotive narrative and that it wouldn't be all over the place with metaphysical philosophies. It's a concrete struggle in a dreamlike setting."

Of course, politics and culture can never be totally separated, and death has a different resonance in Palestine than it does here. All the same, the director argues that, in facing the big existential questions about what we have made of our lives, Jidariyya has a universal appeal.

"When you live in a war zone, death is there," he says. "I lost friends. We are vulnerable. Maybe the fact that we are so vulnerable is sharper where I come from. It only takes being shot at once to understand that you are very vulnerable. It only takes seeing someone shot once to understand that you're a balloon full of water. You can be punctured in a split second.

"Every Palestinian has come close to death. That's life. For the Israelis as well. There's a lot of bloodshed in our area. But I honestly believe that when you are sitting at night alone, at a certain moment you ask: 'What have I done today? What am I doing with my life? How am I preparing for my death?' It's always there. We as human beings know we have an expiration date."

• Jidariyya, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000), August 14-17

• www.eif.co.uk