I feel like I have fairly normie bleeding heart European liberal views on Israel and its treatment of Palestine and as such I found leftwing Israeli performer Itai Erdal’s storytelling piece about his time in the IDF relatively uncontroversial. Perhaps relatively unremarkable, too, theatrically speaking: Anita Rochon’s production has a few nice flourishes but it feels like the text could have gone a round or two with a dramaturg to sharpen it up.
But globally, the unassuming Erdal’s show has attracted controversy – he lives in Vancouver now, where the left attempted to disrupt performances on grounds that he was allegedly a Zionist; in Toronto and Germany he couldn’t get the show staged because it was deemed too explosive vis à vis him being fairly upfront about saying he thinks Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7 2023 constitutes a genocide.
The meat of the play concerns Erdal’s spell in the IDF and how, despite his principles, he went into his service with relative optimism and a belief in its self-portrayal as ‘the most humane army in the world’. Anyone expecting a smoking gun – literal or otherwise – will be relieved/disappointed; his story is less about a single road to Damascus moment and more about an unease about how the Israeli state and army control the movement and lives of Palestinians, entwined with a growing sense that the version of Israel’s history taught in schools was often selective when it came to the Palestine. While he now regrets his service, he makes the point that the IDF is inherently not monolithic, as it reflects the spectrum of Israeli society (albeit his estimation is that this currently skews 80 percent right to 20 percent left).
There are some decent theatrical devices, notably the bookending scenes which concern Erdal’s unbidden thoughts about whether his Arab barber secretly wants to kill him, plus the atmospheric musical accompaniment from Arab multi-instrumentalist Emad Armoush. Co-written with Colleen Murphy, Soldiers of Tomorrow does spool out a bit episodically, and often it feels like Erdal could have more flair for the dramatic – we never hear how his time in the IDF ended, and after taking some pains to introduce his unit, we don’t hear what became of them all.
It’s thoughtful and heartfelt, and if there’s a lack of polish it’s an authentic one that stems from Erdal not being an actor per se – he’s a lighting designer who has a sideline in autobiographical storytelling. It reminded me of Yousef Sweird’s recent Royal Court show Between the River and the Sea; the two both have their faults, but they’d make nice companion pieces, a secular liberal Arab and a secular liberal Jew offering up their experiences of growing up in Israel during roughly the same period, both coming to see how strange it all was in their later years.
Normally I avoid post-show Q&As like the plague, but as Soldiers of Tomorrow comes with one every night it seemed unprofessional not to go. It was an interesting experience: being able to answer questions definitely allowed Erdal to better contextualise the piece; I think also it’s quite a brave thing to do, as clearly audience members bring certain thoughts about Israel with them and you can easily see how it might get quite uncomfortable, although Erdal’s matter-of-fact approach kept a lid on it when I went.
There are some shortcomings, but it’s not every day you get a thoughtful ex-IDF soldier ruminating on his experiences at length. So long as you can bear to hear a man say he thinks Israel’s recent actions have been genocidal, then I think there’s something here for anyone interested in the pathology of the Middle East.
