The horrors of war don’t end with the flash of bullets and the exploding bombs. They continue through troubled dreams and sudden impulsive reactions to things that have become emotional triggers.
They also distort our relationships with friends, with family, with country. Nadav Burstein’s powerful glimpse of the traumatic impact of a brutal war on four friends in Israel is a moving, empathetic and courageous anti-war statement at a time when theatre generally would like to pretend there is no such thing as a war in Palestine.
A short opening section feels like an hallucinatory psychedelic clip from a Vietnam War movie, with sounds of war and a disturbing succession of voices saying from different sections of the theatre such things as “I’ll have my bond. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not an Arab eyes?... If you prick us do we not bleed says the Arab to the Jew.”
The second, much longer section takes us to the off-duty meeting of three friends with a fourth friend, Adam (Harvey Schorah), who is exempt from military service and an anti-war activist. Having recently returned from a peace protest, Adam is furious about the violence of the police and the army for attacking the demonstrators.
You can imagine Adam’s surprise and disgust when the Arab-Israeli Osher (Tarik Badwan) arrives saying he was one of the conscripted Israeli Defence Force soldiers sent to deal with the peace protesters. To complicate matters further, one of the other friends is a pilot, enthusiastic about what he’s doing “to eradicate” the dangerous neighbours who threaten Israel despite an awareness of some very dubious results. A fourth friend, Omri, wants to get out of the army. He says, “I’m walking around with a gun and it scares me.”
Every moment of this tight, completely believable, well-performed piece holds our attention and makes us care even for the people who may be committing atrocities in the name of an unjust war.
Although for many of us, the words of Adam echo our thoughts, we cannot help but feel conflicted as we watch the troubled disturbance of Osher, who has stolen a stash of his father’s pills to deaden his sense of guilt.
This must be one of the most important plays of this year’s Edinburgh Festival. It stands in the tradition of The Trojan Women and Apocalypse Now in expressing the fury and grief of a generation forced into a war that seems to have no end in sight.