Families at war

The Pull of Negative Gravity;

When the Bulbul Stopped Singing

THEATRE Traverse

TWO plays at the Traverse show what rich material the Middle East offers to playwrights and how varied their response can be. One employs melodrama to highlight the human cost of war, while the other uses monologue to bear simple witness to one nation's illegal actions.

The Pull of Negative Gravity by Jonathan Lichtenstein opens as a family awaits the return of Dai to their Welsh farm after he has been serving in the Army in Iraq.

We first see Dai (Lee Haven-Jones) in flashback as a fit young man, engaged to the fey Bethan (Louise Collins). She has had an affair with Dai's brother, Rhys, who inherited a farm that is rapidly failing after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth, but which his mother, Vi (Joanne Howard), is desperate to keep going.

Then Dai comes home badly injured, in a wheelchair and unable to speak, and the close-knit family disintegrates horribly.

Lichtenstein's starting point was the high suicide rate among soldiers in modern conflicts, but he tries too hard to evoke sympathy and raises too many issues - sibling rivalry, parental inadequacy, the harsh economics of farming - that he neither satisfactorily develops nor resolves.

The performances, however, are magnificent and two scenes - where Bethan retches at the prospect of kissing her drooling new husband, and when Dai begs his mother to smother him to release him from his living hell - will stay in the memory for some time. Despite the often overblown drama (just how much bad luck can one family have?), Gregory Thompson's direction is assured.

As is Christopher Simon's performance as Raja in When the Bulbul Stopped Singing. David Greig's adaptation of a diary kept by Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh is a passionate but considered account of what it was like living in Ramallah in April 2002, when the Israelis held several Palestinian towns under siege.

Whatever one's politics, it would be difficult not to be moved by Shehadeh's account of life in a war zone. A Christian Arab who supports neither Hamas nor the Palestinian leadership, Raja is forced to endure separation from his wife, as she is in Cairo when the siege is put in place, and from his sick mother who lives on the side of town.

But instead of engaging in the political resistance that he once supported, Raja adapts to the outside oppression by looking within.

Freedom, he says, is taking possession of one's life - deciding when to get up, how to divide your day, which colour to paint your walls. Such is sumoud, or perseverance, in the hope that one day you will win through.

Simon's beautifully measured performance engages throughout the show's 75 minutes and director Philip Howard's uncluttered production lets the words speak for themselves.

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