Directed by George Ibrahim
Starring Ahmad Abu Sal'um, Doreen Munayyer, Hussam Abu Eisheh, Imad Farajin, Ismail Dabagh, Manal Awad.
Music: Jamil Al-Sayigh
Stage setting: Noboro Tsubaki
Lighting: Muaz Al-Jubah
Choreography: Nicholas Rowe

"To be or not to be?" This may not be the first question that leaps to mind when facing Israel's "security fence" from the inside. After all the indignation, however, after the stamping demands of "Why?" and "How?" and "Who?" and after the dull, grey wall becomes just another routine image in the average day’s despair, it is a question that does surface. To be or not to be. Is life, like this, worth living?

Al-Kasaba Theatre's latest dark comedy asks this and many other day-to-day questions that arise from living inside such a hideous beast. To hilarious and often poignant effect, Al-Jidar (The Wall) follows the lives of seven people as they chart their way around the West Bank. A series of monologues, the performance is thread through nine-metre high concrete monoliths, looking at how this wall affects ordinary Palestinians.

The wall has a very direct impact on the people who created and perform in this production. Living in the Old City of Jerusalem, actress Doreen Munayyer talks about passing the wall as she travels each day to rehearsals in Ramallah. "Each day I feel like I'm going out of one prison and into another." Actor Ahmad Abu Sal'um, also from Jerusalem, explains, "Yesterday I saw a new part filled in at the Bir Nabala intersection, and I felt 'wow, today is the last day I could pass this way.' My wife said, 'I feel a man is like a small fly beside this thing' Now I look at it with my wife's eyes. It makes me feel smaller, somehow."

So what can theatre offer to such humiliation? Satire vs. humanity's concrete solutions. Perhaps it is our best weapon for now. If we can ridicule the wall, tear down its oppressive power from within our own psyches, some liberation might be achieved. To be or not to be? That choice, at least, is ours.

Al-Jidar has been co-produced with the Tokyo International Festival and will tour Japan after initial performances at Al-Kasaba Theatre in Ramallah.