When the Bulbul Stopped Singing

David Greig's stage adaptation of the Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh's first-hand account of the Israeli army's month long occupation of the West Bank town of Ramallah.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
Stuart, Raja Shehadeh says that in part, this diary came about, and the stage play from it, because of what he felt was a shocking ignorance about the Middle East situation. Did you learn anything you didn't know from this?

STUART MACONIE:
Yes, I did. I didn't learn anything in the sense of historical data, shall we say, or pure factual information, and I don't think that was any great loss, because what I did learn was that for me, and perhaps this is a fault on my part, but the word 'Palestinian' conjures up several images in quick succession that I think we've grown used to through television news; that is a young man throwing stones, a weeping woman in a headscarf. I think we see certain images and that prevents a proper understanding of the situation. I thought this show had a different tone. The prevailing tone is often very rueful, very humane, very ambivalent. There is a sense this isn't a strident Palestinian work at all, it gave you an emotional connection with what it must feel like to be in Ramallah that I didn't previously have. It's not necessarily all militants, he's actually quite mocking at one point about militants, it's people growing cabbages, and trying to get on with their novel, and trying to make their computer work.

WARK:
He was also critical, not trenchantly critical, but critical of the Arab world seeing the Palestinians as the soap opera, and also about Arafat's regime, and the corruption that we now know, this was written in 2002, corrupt then and carried on being so. He's not uncritical in that sense, but it was a very restrained script.

IAN RANKIN:
Yeah. It was taken from diaries, and really they don't do an awful lot with the diaries except make the guy speak them. I think the production is wonderful, very simple but very effective. The red carpet which actually is made of sand and you don't realise this, and he then draws the map of Ramallah in the sand for you, was absolutely fantastic. There were nice images throughout like that. David Grieg has been very sparing, he's just put the words on stage as it were, without trying to dress it up too much, but in some ways that's a problem as a piece of theatre. Because a 75 minute monologue is too long for you to concentrate on one person's words¿

WARK:
Sometimes I thought people were just clapping, the people at the end were just clapping for that.

RANKIN:
Especially when it's done as a diary, 13th April, 14th April, you're going "come on!" It's just one thing after another.

BONNIE GREER:
It's beautifully performed, beautifully directed, beautifully written. I do pick up on what you're saying, I think you're absolutely right, I think the problem is that the next step that a playwright like this has to do is to surprise us. We have to be able to have something that's dramatised. This isn't exactly dramatised yet, it is reportage. I think we have a lot of reportage on stage now, we have a lot of journalism on stage. I think playwrights have to take another leap into the imagination. People think the word 'entertainment' is a nasty word, but what entertainment really means is move me, surprise me, challenge me. Like Stuart, I didn't learn anything, but I don't go to the theatre to learn. I go to the theatre to be changed. I want to come out and see something different.

MACONIE:
Having the monologue, although that is dramatically quite limiting, means you were spared what you often get in political theatre, which is two people standing on a stage, pointing at each other and shouting.

WARK:
Every moment you thought something apocalyptic was going to happen, either to his wife on her return, or his mother on her own, or his brother. Of course nothing did, and for I suppose 90% of the people that is the case, they have this fear the whole time.

RANKIN:
The thing is you get everything second or third hand, because he's a writer and a lawyer who's sitting in his little house. He's not being attacked by tanks, he's not being confronted. He's telling you this is happening to other people, I see it on TV, I hear them on the telephone telling these stories, but none of it happens to him.

GREER:
But that's alright because it's down to the job of the dramatist to take it to the next level. Beautifully done, but we need to go to that next level.