On Waters's Miriam and Youssef

Abstract

On Waters's Miriam and Youssef Efrat Urbach and Netta Schramm Miriam and Youssef. By Steve Waters, audio drama, broadcast on BBC World Service, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtv38. Miriam and Youssef, a ten-part BBC World Service audio drama released in 2020, is set in Mandatory Palestine and recounts the story of fictional characters—Arab, Jewish, and British. As this review is concerned with questions of representation, we will not examine the plot's accuracy or fidelity to historical events, leaving that to historians. Instead, as a team comprising a musicologist and a textologist, we focus on the storyline and its accompanying musical line. Each of us focused on elements relevant to her field. Together we address questions of voice, narrative, and especially the congruency of the spoken and musical narratives. Evaluators of audio drama, lacking a theoretical framework, always borrow concepts: close reading from literature, analysis of rhyme and stanza from poetry, shot-by-shot from film studies. Some even try to think of the audio drama as a musical score.1 The audio drama storyline is affected by the atmosphere, tone, and mood created by the music. To the untrained ear, however, these effects may remain transparent. Spoken Narrative The chronicle of the British Mandate in Palestine (1917–1947) is a contested history bearing uncomfortable, bitter, and painful memories for all [End Page 293] involved—Palestinians, Israelis, and the British. Miriam and Youssef, a work of fiction set in a real past, is a political enterprise. "This drama presents an unreliable tale tainted by insidious inaccuracies," writes critic Richard Lightbown.2 Miriam and Youssef is also not the first British drama featuring Britain's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A controversial four-part television drama, The Promise, was released in 2011.3 The Promise builds a dual storyline featuring a contemporary young British woman visiting Israel in the footsteps of the British paratrooper her grandfather once was. One may consider Miriam and Youssef, like The Promise to be a risky postcolonial drama which, fighting amnesia, "takes us somewhere we have learned to forget we ever inhabited."4 Miriam and Youssef's storyline suppresses the British narrative, another form of the postcolonial battle with amnesia. Without contradicting such a reading, another interpretation of this drama's postcolonial momentum is called for. The drama was written by Steve Waters, a prolific playwright and a faculty member at the University of East Anglia. In an article on political dramaturgy, Waters communicates his political preference for bipartisan expositions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His critique is directed at a highly controversial play, Seven Jewish Children, by playwright Caryl Churchill, a response to a 2008 Israel Defense Forces military strike in Gaza. Waters criticizes Churchill not for her "rage at the willful and fruitless brutalities propagated against the people of Gaza by the State of Israel." Rather, Waters's issue is with a one-sidedness in form that leads to poignant rhetoric. His claim is that form, as in artistic decisions about times and places, introduces a logic to content, as in what is said and done on stage.5 Waters concludes by advocating for form-as-content, stressing that form is as important as content. Miriam and Youssef is written to the blueprint of Waters's 2011 article and exhibits great care for decisions on form and bipartisanship. It also reveals other commitments to British perspectives, to be discussed below. Miriam and Youssef's plot contains two and a half intertwining storylines featuring an Arab, a Jew, and a British sergeant, played by Amir El-Masry, Shani Erez, and Blake Ritson, respectively. Miriam is a young Jewish refugee who fled Poland in 1917 when rioters raided and burned down her shtetl. Youssef, destined to be a quarry worker, is the son of the Mukhtar of the village of Deir Yassin. Harry is a gentle and bookish British soldier who is killed halfway through the story. The narrative is ideologically invested in parallelism, a literary technique [End Page 294] that unfolds interlocking events "like the two tapes of a zipper."6 The drama is named for the two protagonists whose fates repeatedly converge and whose moral ambiguities are...