A crossing of 180 metres that takes twelve hours on a bridge linked to British empiricism
Alaa Shehada, the Palestinian theatremaker and member of the Palestine Comedy Club, returns to the Fringe with The Bridge, following last year’s hit The Horse of Jenin.
This time, Shehada begins with memories of his grandparents and olive oil, which his mother asks him to bring from Jenin in the West Bank to her sister in Amman. On his journey, he has to cross the titular bridge, the only official land crossing connecting the West Bank and Jordan. The bridge has different names depending on who is speaking: the Allenby Bridge, named after British General Edmund Allenby, who was active in the region in the late 1910s; the Al-Karameh Bridge, or simply Al-Jisr, as Palestinians call it; and the King Hussein Bridge in Jordan. These names carry the history of the powers that have controlled, crossed and divided this land, with the legacy of British imperialism still embedded in its name.
Most of this one-hour show is simply about what happens on his journey to Jordan. Much of his day is spent on a bus, trying to get through checkpoints, gates and security checks. A journey of just 180 metres takes twelve hours. He plays the different people he encounters along the way, from the taxi driver to the old woman sitting beside him, who is trying to visit her brother. He has his ticket, his passport, his white card, his green card and all the other documents he needs, yet none of them can make the wait any shorter. The accumulation of documents itself becomes part of the absurdity of the journey.
Unlike The Horse of Jenin, which intertwines several timelines, The Bridge spends most of its running time with Shehada sitting on the bus. Apart from archival voices discussing British decisions about Palestine, and the consequences of those decisions for a land that was never theirs to decide over, the only flashback comes when his uncle faces settlers and experiences the humiliation that follows. The deliberately repetitive structure, and the slower pace compared with his previous work, recalls slow cinema such as Tsai Ming-liang’s, making the audience feel the length of the journey across the bridge rather than simply hear about it.
Shehada also imagines an airport, the “International Palestine Super Freedom Airport”, that could replace the bridge. The idea carries a bitter irony. Gaza International Airport, which opened in 1998 as Yasser Arafat International Airport, was attacked by Israeli forces in 2001, destroying its terminal and control tower, and its runway was later damaged beyond use. The airport never reopened. Yet the bridge, despite all the checkpoints, security checks and hours of waiting, remains the only route available to many Palestinians travelling between the West Bank and Jordan. The dream of an airport therefore feels less like an alternative to the bridge than another reminder of how limited those alternatives are. By making us sit through the repetition of that journey, The Bridge does more than tell us about the difficulty of crossing it. It makes us experience the time that the journey demands.
Show listing:
Venue: Studio Two at Assembly George Square Studios / Upstairs at Assembly Roxy
Dates: 6-30 August
Time: Various times
Ticket prices: £18.5/Concession £17.5
Fringe box office: 0131 226 0000 / http://www.edfringe.com
Age suitability: 12+ (Guideline)