Alive from Palestine: Life beyong the headlines

What's it really like doing your weekly shop in the Gaza Strip, or taking a bus ride through Ramallah? A Palestinian theatre company - in London this week - aims to show the truth about everyday life under occupation. So how can that help a nation at war, asks Brian Logan

Do you sometimes skim the foreign pages of the paper, flitting past the latest bulletins from the West Bank? It's frighteningly easy to do. In the two years since the second intifada began, reports from that benighted region have served up an ever less varied diet of murderous oppression and murderous response; of belligerent politicians and cretinous presidents; of settlements and debated resolutions. Last week's coverage focused on a supposed power struggle at the head of the Palestinian authority; the previous week, George Bush divided the trans-Atlantic alliance by calling for Yasser Arafat's ousting from power. In short, nothing in the newspapers encourages us to see past the hot air, the smokescreen of "balance", the whirligig of violence. But we should look: there's something there.

"We don't want to be only news," says George Ibrahim, who runs the Palestinian theatre group Al-Kasaba. "It's the reality of life in Palestine, what's really happening, that people should be given the chance to understand."

We get the chance from this Thursday, when Al-Kasaba's production, Alive from Palestine: Stories under Occupation, arrives at London's Young Vic theatre. Having played three nights at the Royal Court last year (Independent critic Paul Taylor hailed the show his "life-changing" theatrical highlight of 2001), the production's return maintains Al-Kasaba's remarkable campaign to keep theatre alive in Palestine, and to remind the world that behind the headlines there's a people suffering and surviving, with dogged optimism, the worst kind of existence.

According to David Lan, the Young Vic's artistic director, "it seemed blindingly obvious to me that we had to stage the show". When Lan, who came to England 30 years ago from South Africa, was programming the theatre's season earlier this year, events in the Middle East were taking a sinister turn. "The government of Israel," he recalls, "had a strategy which I recognised from my experience in South Africa, which involves the destruction not only of the political entity [of Palestine] but also the social and cultural entities, in order totally to demoralise people, to destroy their integrity as a culture. Anything one can do to assist in resisting that, one wants to do."

George Ibrahim, a former children's TV star and irrepressible Middle East celebrity, has found himself and his theatre at the sharp end of that strategy. Al-Kasaba was formed in Jerusalem in 1970; it opened a Ramallah venue in the late Nineties, shortly before the conflict re-ignited. Alive from Palestine came into being after the occupation, when the Israeli-imposed system of curfews and checkpoints brought the company's usual theatrical activity to a juddering halt. The new show responded to that occupation day-by-day, by presenting onstage an ever-changing collection of improvised snapshots – some tragic, some comic – of daily life at the invaders' heel. It reflected Palestinians' own experiences back at them from the stage. It helped salve communal wounds; it even raised spirits.

The Israeli military attacked Al-Kasaba's Ramallah building earlier this year. Was it a target, or collateral damage? George Ibrahim is in little doubt. "We have been hit three times during the occupation. They targeted lots of cultural associations. At Al-Kasaba, they ripped up the main seats, they broke down doors and windows, and they totally destroyed the theatre's sound system and some of the lighting." Photographs of the damage are splashed defiantly across the company's website. But Al-Kasaba's tough job had been made tougher.

"It's a miracle that they operate at all," says Elyse Dodgson, who runs the Royal Court's international programme and has helped bring the company to London. "That they've managed to get this show together again, and take it to the States and to the UK, is a tribute to the stamina and determination of the company." Leaving Palestine was an achievement in itself. "They were lucky this time," says Dodgson, "because they got out a day before the last invasion. Ramallah was closed at the end of June, but by then they were safely in Jerusalem and on their way out. If it had been a day later, who knows?"

The version of Alive from Palestine that the company escaped with is less fluid than last year's, however. According to Ibrahim, the actors were exhausted by having to constantly devise new sketches to respond to new events. It's tempting to speculate that new events so grimly resembled old events that fresh scenes were unnecessary. On a more practical level, says Ibrahim, "we can't meet one another to work. There's seldom the opportunity, because we're scattered between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It's impossible because of the checkpoints and the curfews. It wasn't until we got to the States that we could rehearse together."

Their trip to the States, at the start of this month, was hardly less stressful. "We had been informed before we went," says Ibrahim, "that there were people trying to shut us up, to take away our right to speak, as if the world should listen only to their version." Sure enough, the company's gigs at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven were picketed by the pro-Israeli lobby. Audiences had to pass through metal detectors to enter the theatre. Performances were followed by tense debates about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"The image of Palestinians," Ibrahim told his US crowd, "especially in America, is that of terrorists. But we are human beings. We are artists. And this is our life." He was pleased with audience's responses – but alarmed by the culture. "In America," Ibrahim reports, "people are totally twisted to the Israeli side. I knew that already – what surprised me is how deeply ingrained that influence is in America. You can smell it in the street, you can see it everywhere."

London is more phlegmatic, but David Lan is braced for a little friction. "I expect some [protests]," he says, "and that's fine really. The important thing is that we present shows. And this is one that we think people should see. The response we get is, 'how are you going to balance it?' Well, if there's an Israeli company that we ought to be presenting, I'd really like to know about it."

It's the Palestinian cause, however, rather than the Israeli one, that has been taken up as a liberal cause célèbre – in much the same way as the British took to the anti-apartheid movement. Thirty years ago, David Lan was instrumental in bringing to England Athol Fugard's seminal anti-apartheid play Sizwe Bansi is Dead. (Its follow-up, The Island, recently enjoyed a successful West End revival). "One of the great joys of being a producer," says Lan, "is that you can make wonderful work that has an impact beyond the theatre – it's what we all strive for, but it's incredibly difficult to do.

"Like Al-Kasaba, Sizwe Bansi came out of political struggle. But there wasn't a powerful Afrikaans lobby in London going around saying 'are you going to show the other side as well?'" Lan is happy to admit that he's staging Alive from Palestine to spark a political response. "Work like this has to be a spur to some sort of action, even if it's just changing the nature of the debate. It needs to cause people to engage in a slightly different way. That's the point of political theatre." After two decades in which theatre has tended to resist overt political commitment, Lan hopes "there's a swing back in terms of our engagement with the lives of other people in other countries. I'd very much like us to promote that if it's possible to do so."

Which would be fine with George Ibrahim. "We have many things to say to people outside Palestine," he says. "We have to bring our suffering outside. Because the rest of the world sees us through the news. They don't see us as people living and people suffering." David Lan agrees: "there's almost no feeling anywhere about what sort of society [Palestine] is. There's no sense at all of the creative life, the artistic life. The very fact that there is an artistic life is remarkable in itself." George Ibrahim intends to keep it that way, in the face of impossible odds. "We won't just raise our hands and say, 'we quit'. But we need the support and the help of everybody to let us go on. Because I don't know what a country without theatre would be like."

'Alive from Palestine: Stories under Occupation': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), Thursday to 27 July