Babba Ghanoush and Bagels
Hill Street Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: 2-Act Theatre Company

Tim Markham

Uri Roodner's production is an odd fish, and a slippery one to get a hold of at that. It starts with some effective disorientation, as the two actors appear in their culturally neutral underwear before getting kitted up in full traditional Palestinian and Jewish cosume and exchanging salaams and shaloms with the audience - only to reveal that they are in fact a couple of likely geezers from East London.

What follows is an absurd, sometimes whimsical adventure as the two trade in their Ibiza tickets for a flight to Jerusalem. It's not clear why they are visiting the land their grandfathers left behind to sell babba ghanoush and bagels in Britain, but the trip does involve a detour to the moon where our protagonists, natch, attempt to sell babba ghanoush and bagels.

The play is preposterous and facile, and deliberately so. Shlomo and Sharif are visited in their dreams by their grandfathers telling them to stop playing for laughs and engage instead in political theatre, but their intention to adhere to the former is made clear. The cast carry off the task with ease, demonstrating a clear talent for physical comedy and a natural rapport with a sympathetic audience.

But there is clearly much else working below the surface of the play. The cheeky naivety of Shlomo and Sharif does not seem to be aimed at disarming a cynical and sceptical festival crowd, winning them over with the argument that we're all brothers underneath and love is all we need. Nor do they seem particularly committed to lambasting peaceniks in the UK for their own naivety. What the show demonstrates is that British Muslim and Jewish identity is something of a chocolate box entity, dipped into at will and discarded just as quickly. If there is a message it is that these characters, who are united at the literal drop of a hat, by the donning of trainers or singing the songs of each other's culture, have no hope of getting their heads around the Pandora's box (as opposed to the chocolate box) that is Jerusalem.

The show is brought to a rather abrupt end when Shlomo and Sharif die under an Israeli bulldozer. This is not a death of real pathos, of youthful idealism crushed by a political-military machine. If there is dramatic tragedy, it is that the audience knows full well that the characters have no idea why they are about to be killed. It relays the incomprehensibility of a world which simply doesn't speak to our heroes of Palestinian and Israeli descent, and the play's refusal to fall into the simple juxtaposition of peace and war or coexistence and fundamentalism is laudable.

Some audience members later expressed anger that the play 'takes sides' by choosing this death for Sharif and Shlomo rather than their falling victim to suicide bombers. Of course, a play about this subject sort of subject matter will always take sides to an extent. The considerable feat which this production pulls off is to present a story which wears its innocence and superficiality on its sleeve, but which undermines precisely that conceit as it progresses and darkens.

1 August to 25 August.

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