Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea

Hard on the heels of Caryl Churchill's 'Seven Jewish Children' comes Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud's new rapid-response to the recent conflict in Gaza. The play adopts precisely the opposite strategy to Churchill's piece, choosing to focus almost entirely on Palestinian characters and studiously avoids any reference to either Judaism or Islam. On the face of it, the drama is about the 'human tragedy', but, inevitably it takes a position. As such, its pretended objectivity becomes deeply insidious. Theatrically, the piece is a rather fun mix of pretty much everything. It's got Palestinian music and dancing, it's got monologues and drama, stuff that looks like verbatim theatre and stuff that's clearly speculative, video footage and clips from news programmes, comedy and tragedy and physical theatre. These elements are loosely framed by the story of a young Palestinian who has lost his will to live: he is led, Dante-like, around scenes showing some of the various ways one can die in Gaza, which, it is noted, can be translated as 'hell'. Whilst carefully including a Jewish conscientious objector as one of the numerous talking heads, and a news clip in which the claim that Hamas use human shields is made, the piece remains impossibly partial. By showing the young man finally choosing to lose his life by joining 'the resistance', Butcher and Masoud imply that Palestinian Muslims have been forced into a corner and that Hamas is purely a resistance movement, not an aggressor.