The bridge that connects Palestine’s West Bank to Jordan is no longer particularly necessary as an actual bridge: the River Jordan has largely run dry where it crosses, its waters diverted away by Israel. What it really is, is a bureaucratic nightmare: a 180 metre span that contains three checkpoints – Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian – and is perpetually incredibly busy because it’s the only direct route out of the country for the West Bank’s three million Palestinian inhabitants.
Palestinian actor and comic Alaa Shehada scored a memorable hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe with his moving monologue The Horse of Jenin. And The Bridge is its follow-up: a pungent account of his interminable odyssey to bring a large can of olive oil from the family grove on the West Bank to his aunt, who lives in Jordan: just two hours away as the crow flies, but a nightmare to actually get to.
Under happier circumstances The Bridge might amount to a gently absurdist account of a man in a very long queue. And indeed to a large extent that’s what it is: it’s not a polemic but rather a mostly amusing yarn - buoyed by Shehada’s audience patter skills - of him negotiating crazy taxi drivers, mad family remembers and being stuck next to an eccentric old lady on the various required buses over the bridge when he wanted to sit next to the improbably non-flustered looking hot girl. (The bridge itself has three different names, one for each power – Israel refers to it by the old British name of the Allenby Bridge; Shehada simply refers to it as… the bridge).
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the subject of Palestine and its relationship with Israel is quite a contentious topic. I think Shehada is well aware that he’s liable to attract a pro-Palestine audience and for that reason he doesn’t lean too hard into tales of occupation misery. In a largely droll 90 minutes, it’s the flashes that are the most telling: the anger and humiliation he feels at the Israeli checkpoint, where teenage soldiers who can’t speak Arabic treat the transiting Palestinians like suspicious packages; some devastating late kickers about the actions of illegal Israeli settlers.
There’s also (I think) an effort to show a Western audience that Palestinians are actually regular people who do regular things – there is a danger that we view them through the prism of being victims only. It’s actually kind of startling when Shehada makes repeated jokes about family members going over to Turkey to get hair transplants. We do that too! We just don’t have to spend all day on a bridge to begin the journey.
It lacks a nimble story arc or structure: it really is 90 minutes of a man (entertainingly!) explaining the bureaucracy of a bridge. And I think Sam Beale’s production (he also co-writes) is reaching for a more interesting dramatic form than it really achieves: interludes detailing the arbitrary British imposition of borders on the land following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire feel a bit brief and nothingy in the end; Shehada’s fixation on the idea of the West Bank getting an airport maybe needs to be articulated a bit differently as to an outsider it perhaps comes across as a bit of a tangent.
The Bridge is not perfect and I wonder if the need to be ready for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe just a year after Shehada’s last show has left it a bit rough around the edges. But it’s still good: likeable, illuminating, funny and enraging when it wants to be.