“Two Names, That Meet and Part is a standout at this year’s PALART Festival.”
Now in its fifth year, the PALART Festival brings with it a vibrant offering of Palestinian stories, this time at the Pleasance Theatre. In addition to supporting – through opportunities for development of new work – Palestinian artists in the UK, the PALART Collective seeks to push back against mainstream media’s growing exclusion and erasure of Palestinian narratives. With over 74,000 Palestinians killed since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the work of the PALART Collective could not be more critical right now. Its tireless and innovative programming serves not only a means of remembering and bringing forward the voices of those lost; it is also a creative rallying call for collective action and the active reimagining of a future that serves the many over the few.
The writing, directing, and acting in this production all exist at a level that just about bursts the seams of the Pleasance Theatre’s cozy Studio space. Written by British-Lebanese playwright Tara Kelly and directed by Issy Snape, Two Names, That Meet and Part follows the fictional story of Youssef (Jad Sayegh), a young Palestinian who arrives at the marble-pillared steps of Columbia University in 2023 to pursue a degree in International Relations. Introducing himself as Joe and refusing to tell even his new romantic interest (Gaia Mondadori) where he’s from, Youssef begins to navigate the two selves he feels compelled to carry with him in order to stay afloat, fit in, and survive so far from home.
After Hamas’s attack on October 7th, what was once a concealable internal conflict splinters into something Youssef can no longer hide – from others or himself. Forced to face the reality of America’s hazy dream of democracy, Youssef learns how a nation that prides itself on freedom not only fails to protect his own but is actually designed to take it away in the blink of an eye – or, in Youssef’s case, an unsuspecting moment at Columbia’s historic Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
One of the unique features of this story (and a testament to the strength of its writer and director) is that it is a simple retelling made manifest specifically for the stage. Unlike a lot of plays that hamper themselves with stuffy and undynamic recollections of the past, Two Names, That Meet and Part keeps its audience strapped in until the very end. The largely simple, yet incredibly inventive use of blocks – even the intention with which the actors moved them around – utterly transformed the space, and kept the momentum going when it could have dropped. It was the kind of theatre that playfully holds a hand out to an audience’s imagination, so immediately and effectively pulling us into a story we might not all relate to directly. By the end, you tangibly feel Yousseff’s splitting sense of self – and the anger, pain, and loneliness that goes along with it – amid the fractured chaos of his world. Even the ghost of famed American activist Rachel Corrie (Tilly Botsford) – killed while protesting in Gaza in 2003 – was a character you imagined living on long after the houselights came back up. All around, it was a night of theatre that achieved everything it sought out to do and more.
The play’s title comes from the line of a poem by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I am from there. I am from here. I am not there. I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.
Darwish was imprisoned for his poetry and exiled from his homeland in the 1960s. Moving from country to country, he used his writing to not only draw international attention to the Israeli occupation but also to actively help shape Palestinian politics, most notably writing Palestine’s National Declaration of Independence in 1988 while serving on the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s executive committee. His legacy as an artist and activist serves as a reminder of art’s power to not only imagine but also build a society we can believe in and continue to fight for.
Two Names is now sold out, but a ticket to any of the PALART Festival shows this year is a vote for the arts and its power to bring historically oppressed voices to the public’s conscious. You’d be wise to catch a show before the festival concludes this weekend. Check for tickets here.