Two reviews of  Territories Written by: Niki Landau Directed by: Paul Lambert at the Theatre Passe Muraille

Review #1, found on Toronto Theater Blog: November 2005, edited severely by Jonathon (who loved it).

Niki Landau’s “Territories”, part of the Stage 3 festival at the Passe Muraille, does everything right stylistically.  It uses both levels of the Passe Muraille stage, has a character waiting in the audience who becomes part of the play and a change in the playbill which is literally rained on the audience. These three devices could never have been done on television or the movies.  And the topic is one of interest to many: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has all the hallmarks of a hit play, but … … … by giving us conventional left-of-centre wisdom, no one likely to see the play will be challenged, and theatre will go on pandering to its insular progressives, limiting its potential market, and thus its impact.

A Canadian Jewish woman, Sarah (Landau) is talking about her life in Israel when a Palestinian man, Hisham (Sam Kalilieh) interrupts her one woman show and claims that the stage is his “house”. Who do you think gets the best lines? The play starts with the sounds of a tennis match. …

Gandhi’s take on the Holocaust was this: “Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… that would have been heroism.” … To me this statement is immoral. …  I can come to terms with the fact that Gandhi came from a different culture and thus thought differently than I do, and I don’t for a moment think he thought Jews should be slaughtered en masse. But his thought process evolved from his culture and experiences, me from mine, and there is no neutral ground, no “humanistic median”…

Dealing with that uncomfortable truth would have made this play truly fascinating. For instance, … Hisham begins to recite all the problems of Israel’s security wall by wringing off statistics about houses demolished, trees uprooted etc. But to be honest, it means nothing to me. The only statistic that does is the drop in deaths since its construction, which he never utters.The story of the Israeli-Palestinian culture is not that underneath it all, we’re the same, but that we’re very different.

… If the two sides could have made peace, they would have. …  Even as Sarah relates a personal story, Hisham claims it is irrelevant in the scope of the suffering of millions. No Jew is going to buy into that. We’re talking a different language, a different set of values…. Had Landau elected to forgo the secular Palestinian and the liberal Canadian, and written the hardened Sabra versus the mosque-going activist, we would have had a more unsettling, but more interesting piece. It would have challenged us, rather than reaffirm our soft-focus delusions. At one point, Hashim accuses Sarah of acting like a typical Westerner by “defining the playing field”, and to some extent, this is true of the entire play. It’s not ready to tackle either cultures’ more militant mainstream. 

– review by Theater Blogger   [severely edited by Jonathon]

Review #2: “Theater Blogger”‘s response shows that the play’s case study in sharing space and dialogue is both necessary and engaging.  Territories is theatre at its best. – Jonathon

  » Comment | Edit |   Quote

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Categories: Theatre
Tags » geo-politics | peace & conflict | Theatre

Subscribe to Updates (be notified if this post is edited)

url

Your Email address:

Subscribe to All Pages' Updates: