From Challenge

From Challenge # 79 May-June 2003

culture

The Veto Theatre

Sharon Roth

Photographs by Assaf Evron

AT A TEL AVIV theatre on April 15, some 250 people gathered for the sixth event staged by the "Platform Against the War". Sponsored by the Organization for Democratic Action (ODA), the Platform offers a forum to all who oppose America's predatory attack on the Iraqi people.

The program was packed – and unsettling. Thirty performers took part in thirteen presentations, some written especially for the occasion. The Veto Theatre gave them the space, both physical and political, to launch their own "bunker-penetrating" barbs against American aggression. The actors and the audience performed together a political act, joining millions elsewhere, including other artists and writers, who are fed up with White House bullying and have resolved to speak out.

The Platform's earlier events, featuring singers, filmmakers, poets, painters and sculptors, took place in the ODA headquarters in Jaffa. The move to Tel Aviv's Tzavta (once a fringe theatre, now mainstream) raised the visibility of its protest by several notches. Thus, rejection of the war popped up in the heart of complacent, hedonistic Tel Aviv. Ruti Ben Efrat, ODA member and actress, initiated, organized and moderated the evening. In her opening remarks she quoted George Steiner: "Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent." She added: "There is an enormous human tendency toward indifference. One function of art is to serve as a weapon against that."

Indifference is a fitting term for the way in which, at its best, the Israeli public relates to the sufferings of the Iraqi people, which for twelve years has paid – and will continue to pay – a heavy price for the open and concealed wars that America has waged on its back. At its worst, this public gives the American effort eager and jubilant support, licking its chops upon seeing yet another Arab state fall into that country's imperial hands. Thus is proved once again, it believes, the superiority of the enlightened West over the benighted, primitive Arab, who by nature is unsuited to democracy.

Such thin, predictable responses need not arouse wonder. Photos of tense American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad resemble those of Israeli soldiers in Gaza or Nablus, where the government "lets the army win" (as the right-wing mantra has it) – not that Israelis want to think too much about this. The Veto Theatre chose to rummage precisely here, in the sedated Israeli consciousness, to jostle its "self-evident" ideology and awaken its obedient soldiers from their slumber.

There is nothing like a good stage performance to do the job. Shakespeare's Hamlet said it well: “…The purpose of playing ….is to hold…the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” (Act 2, Scene 3)

The Veto Theatre presented, on this evening, creations in various genres from the Bible and classical Greece through Shakespeare to the modern stage. All dealt with the nature of the power that seeks to dominate the Other (be this a person or a political entity), with the means that power uses and with the victims it leaves behind.

Picnic on the Battlefield

Natalie Shilman, a young actress and director, is a graduate of the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio in Tel Aviv. She directed Fernando Arrabal's "Picnic on the Battlefield" especially for the evening. A couple visits its soldier-son in action. While bombs burst around them, the family makes a madcap picnic, joined by an enemy whom their son has captured. A series of comic situations highlights the family's impossible encounter with the Other. The play ends on a merry note with the slaughter of all concerned.

I asked Natalie Shilman what led her to choose this work for the Veto Theatre.

"The situation in the region is that people are being killed left and right, whether here or in Iraq, and the rest just go on with their lives as usual. They busy themselves with the Passover barbecue and enclose themselves in a bubble. The idea seems to be that as long as what's mine is all right, I'm all right. That's what I want to stand up against, speak out against, and "Picnic on the Battlefield" suits the purpose. First, there's no better image for escapism than a picnic in the midst of war. Everything around them is in flames, but the characters go on as usual, switching the channel when the news comes on. Second, in the encounter with the enemy, the parents keep their good manners, their political correctness, their generosity toward every human being as such. All this transpires, though, on the most superficial level – and as long as it serves their image of themselves. The moment they have to recognize the enemy as a human being, as an equal and autonomous subject standing opposite them, they fail. Their self-identity is founded first and foremost on their supposed superiority to the Other. This comes to expression brilliantly in the family triangle. The father pushes the mother down, the mother the son, and the son the prisoner. Everything is based on power, control."

Dayenu

The Veto Theatre staged its event on the night before Passover, a festival that by its heroic aspect (easily assimilated to the story of Zionist redemption) arouses thoughts on freedom and slavery. The aromas of spring hang heavy in the air, while the Jewish people in Israel celebrates a dubious freedom, achieved by the reduction of another people to a condition akin to slavery The aromas hang heavy, while the Americans sell a similar package, disguised in the dazzling colors of freedom, to the people of Iraq.

Alon Neumann, actor and writer, composed a satirical version of the Passover song Dayenu: "I used it to show how people sing songs that supply them with a national and religious ethos, without really thinking about what they are saying. They go through the motions. I came to the evening to express a view, to say what I think about the way things are going. In a democracy there must be a place to express an opinion. In Israel, the herd instinct wins out. It's convenient when others do your thinking for you, when there's someone to draw the picture and explain what is happening. It troubles me that the state merely rolls on, while the faculty of judgment among its citizens atrophies."

The Conquest of the Soviet Union

Amitai Ya'ish, actor and writer, is angered by the lack of political protest in Israeli theatre. "There are lots of rhinoceroses who put on a show of humanism but forget the basic obligation of art to the human being and his freedom."

Ya'ish chose to perform a piece written by the late Hanoch Levin, Israel's foremost satirical dramatist, in response to the war of 1967 (called by some the "six-day war"). It takes the form of a report by an Israeli officer to his superiors, explaining how three Israelis conquered the Soviet Union in ten minutes. The use of military jargon put to mockery the arrogance of Israelis after the '67 war. Israel did not know what it was getting into, and the price it would have to pay, for the spectacle of 1967. So America has no idea of the entanglements that await it when it tries to impose its colonial regime on Iraq.

Ya'ish: "Hanoch undermined the euphoria of many people then, which was like that of Americans today, after their success in toppling the Iraqi regime so fast. In 1967, victory albums went forth from Zion, Israel won enormous admiration throughout the world, volunteers from abroad poured into the kibbutzim. So now, the Americans crown themselves with wreaths, but they have no understanding for the outcome. It's amazing how relevant Hanoch's text is today."

While the American media are busy making the war aesthetic, the Veto Theatre used its own aesthetic sense to tell the truth about what war is: its absurdity, its cruelty, its superfluity.

More photos from the event: