Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani

Abstract

Reviewed by: Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani Erica Stevens Abbitt RETURNING TO HAIFA. By Ghassan Kanafani. Adapted by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace. Directed by Caitlin McLeod. Finborough Theatre, London. March 3, 2018. The tempestuous political environment of 2018 was marked by the seventieth anniversary of what some celebrated as the founding of the state of Israel and others deplored as the Nakba (or “catastrophe”) of the Palestinian people. In this landmark year, an American stage adaptation of Returning to Haifa by the late Palestinian activist, author, and journalist Ghassan Kanafani challenged cherished assumptions about the progressive nature of contemporary US theatre. Remarkably sympathetic to both sides, Returning to Haifa was originally a novella, published a few years before Kanafani’s assassination by a car bomb in 1972. It concerns a Palestinian couple who drive across the Israeli border in 1967 searching for the home and infant son they were forced to leave behind twenty years earlier. Invited in by the elderly widow (and Holocaust survivor) who took over their property, they encounter a young man in an Israeli army uniform who embraces his Jewish identity and foster mother. The meeting is painful, awkward, and at times even humorous, but the ending seems inevitable. The couple leave Haifa without their long-lost son, wondering if the conflict will ever end. Kanafani’s story has been adapted for the stage in Denmark, Lebanon, and Israel, where the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv created a version in Arabic and Hebrew that toured to Theater J in Washington, D.C. In 2010, a “rogue” version in English was produced by Evanston’s Next Theatre, deepening the ethical debate on translation and the representation of Palestinian issues. American playwrights Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi were granted the rights for a new adaptation by the Kanafani estate. Wallace, [End Page 106] a Kentucky-born, UK-based poet, screenwriter, and playwright, is best known for her dramas on class, war, labor, gender, and race (One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, And I and Silence). Khalidi, a Palestinian American playwright (Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues), is currently writing works for Noor Theatre and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click for larger view View full resolution Marlene Sidaway (Miriam), Myriam Acharki (Safiyya), and Ammar Haj Ahmad (Said) in Returning to Haifa. (Photo: Scott Rylander, courtesy of Lynne McConway Productions.) The Khalidi/Wallace version of Returning to Haifa was supported by a commission from New York’s Public Theater, where artistic director Oskar Eustis planned to direct it. After a successful reading, the production stalled in 2016, several months before the US election. According to the playwrights, although the Public cited scheduling issues, the decision was actually prompted by board members concerned with the risk of presenting a play on Palestinian themes. UK independent producer Lynne McConway and director Caitlin McLeod stepped in, offering to present the work at London’s Fin-borough Theatre, a fifty-seat venue renowned for its advocacy of contemporary British, American, and Canadian drama. For the world premiere of the newly adapted Returning to Haifa, a resourceful British team concentrated on turning the challenge of an unanticipated change of venue (and country) to advantage. Although set in the midst of large events, the play is tightly focused in scope. McLeod and her design team wisely configured the tiny space at their disposal into an inviting central area with a minimalist set (designed, along with costumes, by Rosie Elnile). Representing home, exile, and the journey in between, it was saturated by warm Mediterranean light (Joshua Gadsby) and enhanced by a soundscape evoking city and sea (David Gregory). The actors, surrounded on all sides by spectators, moved fluidly around one another in a vivid interplay between past and present (the movement director was Lanre Malaolu). Said (played by Ammar Haj Ahmad) was rumpled, charming, angry, and self-deprecating in turn. Ahmad’s virtuosity with language drove the tempo of the play, which is also about the ability (and inability) to communicate when political rhetoric encounters emotion. Said’s wife, Safiyya (Myriam Acharki), came to life in the stage version with a beautifully observed performance of a spouse sparring with her excitable husband while...