Fringe theatre review: Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine

Portobello Town Hall (Venue 469) until 15 August

In her introduction to Tuesday’s opening day of the Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine mini-festival of Palestinian artists taking place out at Portobello Town Hall, co-producer Sara Shaarawi said one of the key purposes of the event is to make sure those artists know they always have a home in Scotland. “It's never been more vital to raise up and listen to Palestinian voices,” she told a warmly appreciative crowd.

Running across four days, from Tuesday until Friday this week, Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine is a showcase of music, dance, storytelling and discussion, organised and crowdfunded by a group of Scotland-based artists with support from Scottish theatre charity Independent Arts Projects and the Workers Theatre Co-operative. On the opening day, the focus rested mainly on theatrical and performance-based works, although a couple of the afternoon’s events were hit by travel issues.

The opening artist was intended to be Noor Abuarafeh, with her performance-lecture An Orange Tree, An Olive Tree and a Painting That Knows No Borders (★★★★), but the artist was sadly unable to attend. Shaarawi explained this had nothing to do with UK visa issues; in fact, everything was in order for Abuarafeh’s visit, but an impromptu visit to Ireland on the way and a delayed passport return after Schengen approval meant Abuarafeh couldn’t make it here in time.

Instead, the short work was delivered by actor Sofia Asir, who had only been delivered the script on the train up from London earlier in the day and had managed just forty-five minutes’ rehearsal time with it. However, both the nature of the piece and the quality of Asir’s delivery meant it was still a perfectly beautiful, satisfying piece, which lightly but resoundingly outlined the human condition of life in Palestine, specifically in the West Bank.

Seated at a desk in front of a laptop, with a back projection showing photographs and films of a gorgeous, arid landscape, Asir speaks Abuarafeh’s words, telling of the simple act of going for a countryside walk. Outlining with maps the areas of the West Bank which are actually Palestinian towns and which are areas under Israeli army control and currently being settled, the text tells us solo-walking is inadvisable and that wherever you set out from, you’ll always end up back in the same place.

The piece opens out into a memory of Abuarafeh’s father, who painted the trees of the title and the shoreline of Gaza with an inkling, she believes, that these would no longer exist one day. She describes Israeli attempts to create national parkland in this area, the Aleppo pine of the western Mediterranean being brought in, resulting in the replacement of those orange and olive trees. With a delicate, absorbing focus on nature throughout, Abuarafeh (through Asir) reminds us that settlement and displacement go hand-in-hand.

Later in the day, the Arab Puppet Theatre Foundation delivered their darkly comedic piece Performance Desperately in Need of An Audience (★★★), and sadly, this play was disrupted by a visa refusal. Created for a trio of actors, only two were able to perform it this time, so the version we saw was excerpted and abridged. Still, there was much to like about it, not least a great set made out of a towering arrangement of cardboard flecked with pen windows and little lights, giving the impression of a dusty hillside town in Palestine.

Performed silently, save for comedic grunts and gasps, the piece sees Mahmoud Hourani’s ordinary, tracksuited Palestinian guy going about his day, when he’s accosted first by a large cardboard bomber which searches him, ordering him to show his ankles and turn out his bag of vegetables, and then by a cardboard drone which in turn lands on a cardboard chicken the man has befriended, and which he tries to revive. The tone is light, the weapons of destruction (both puppeteered by Mariam Balhas) cartoonish, but the events it brings humour to are impossibly dark.

The day also featured poetry from Dareen Tatour and Gaza Poets Society, and a later-evening performance of Fadi Murad’s Flux in This Forgotten Farm, which were hopefully undisrupted by border issues. This festival declares itself to be a cultural bridge, whose values are freedom of expression, creativity and resilience, and all were certainly in evidence during its first day.