Fresh from winning a Scotsman Fringe First at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Bridge transferred to London’s Bush Theatre. Alaa Shehada, co-founder of the Palestine Comedy Club, makes it clear that humour does not soften a hard truth, but softens the audience enough to sit still. Co-written by Shehada and director Sam Beale, Shehada’s solo show is built around a line an immigration officer once threw at him mid-crossing the terrifying Jordan Valley: “This is theatre, why don’t you make a show about this?” The result demands that its audience immerse themselves in a world they have long been kept at a safe distance from.
The moment Shehada steps into the central, single warm spotlight carrying a yellow container filled with olive oil for his uncle, the space ceases to feel like a theatre at all. It is transformed into a continuous check point, and we are all, for the next hour, suspended in the same uncertainty that defines the route Shehada now guides us across: the treacherous journey from the West Bank to Jordan that thousands of Palestinians are forced to take every day.
The stage remains bare throughout the performance apart from a single wooden bench and the fluorescent yellow container. Every excess is stripped away to make room for what matters most: a marginalised voice, fighting to be heard. Sound does the work a set might usually do, thick with claustrophobia: flies, chatter, the drone of airplanes, muffled phone calls to relatives. Old broadcast updates such as one on the Allenby Bridge interrupt the show, reaching forward from the past into the present. This archival footage suddenly loses its distance when we later learn that during the Fringe run itself, Shehada’s uncle’s olive trees were forcibly cut down, reminding us that this isn’t history — it’s happening right now.
This same urgency carries into the pace at which Shehada shifts between various characters such as an overly affectionate elderly woman, a young, attractive female traveller and an unmoved immigration officer — all of whom are rendered through physicality and vocals alone. Though the female caricatures earn their laughs, a different shade of femininity would have been welcomed
Particularly poignant is the show’s recurring airport motif. The real crossing Shehada makes is forced and precarious, and he imagines a future ‘Palestine International Freedom Airport’ where the crossing will be offered as a mere simulation — the flies, heat and chaos re-created for those who wish to remember what it once felt like, permitted to walk away when they’ve had enough. The irony quickly curdles as discomfort catches up with the audience. In reality, exiting isn’t a choice anyone gets to make. The irony sharpens further given the theatrical setting where every seat holds someone who travelled freely to fill it. The final image, a plane taking flight, offers hope. Yet, the show leaves behind a harder question than any it answers: how many more stories like this one are still being denied the platform to be heard?
Programme image provided to The Student by Four PR on behalf of The Bridge.
