'Between The River and The Sea' review — this thoughtful solo show reflects on identity and tolerance

Read our review of Isabella Sedlak and Yousef Sweid's Between The River and The Sea, now in performances at the Royal Court to 9 May.

Summary

• Isabella Sedlak and Yousef Sweid's Between The River and The Sea comes to the Royal Court
• The story centres on a Palestinian Israeli man in a custody battle
• Sweid is a compelling performer of a show that makes a plea for tolerance

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” King Lear’s question informs every minute of this hourlong solo performance by Isabella Sedlak and Yousef Sweid that finds the 49-year-old Sweid pondering his identity at every turn.

As well he might: a Palestinian Israeli with two children by different Jewish women, Sweid defies ready categorisation. For that matter, so does a show which, he tells us at the outset, isn’t nearly as provocative as its title might suggest. Sweid's main concern, he reports, has to do with a custody battle over his daughter as the result of a second divorce and not with the events of October 7 or the war in Gaza. At least not if he can help it.

But how fully can we ever insulate ourselves from goings-on around us? And what happens when the world seems determined to mark out an identity we may not feel ourselves? Small wonder Sweid talks of envying a teenage son who is “ignorant by choice” – which is to say, trying to accept people as they are and not in terms of the assumptions that genetics or geography might bring with them.

This is meaty, weighty stuff, and some might regard Sweid’s approach as a dereliction of responsibility, given the degree to which realpolitik forces people into increasingly binary points of view. Derided age four as a “stinky Arab”, he’s in fact a polyhyphenate of dizzying proportions – his family belongs to at least seven ethnicities and countries – who wants to find his own way amidst ongoing pressure, he tells us, to “take a stand”. (This show makes an apt companion piece to last year's wonderful Bush solo play, The Horse of Jenin.)

“On which side are we?”, Sweid reports his son asking, the seeming innocence of the question informing the director Sedlak’s production throughout. All our speaker knows is that Arabic is a “beautiful and sexy” language, and that sex is a good defense against death. On which front, perhaps there might be an available partner hidden among the press night audience: at one point, Sweid scans the Royal Court’s intimate Theatre Upstairs for possible further intimacies elsewhere.

The show premiered in Berlin, where Sweid lives, before travelling to Edinburgh, and its geniality of spirit is itself established early on as a shock of sorts all its own. Far more common are the posters and placards that Sweid produces at varying times, which range from calls to boycott the Israeli presence at Shakespeare’s Globe back in 2012 to the sort of shameful graffiti one finds scrawled in toilets and elsewhere.

Casually dressed with little beyond a chair and mic stand for companionship, Sweid summons the sonorous voice of his father one minute, a hard-hitting German divorce lawyer the next: her mission, it seems, is to prepare her client lest a domestic war erupt to eclipse the territorial one at large, one or both surely hellbent on toppling our speaker from his cheerfully apolitical perch.

There’s no obvious conclusion to such a scenario in art, much less in life, but The River and The Sea reaches a climax that feels absolutely right. What if his children – born to different women - find themselves themselves conjoined in friendship and at least open to a fully accepting world that exists away from ready labelling and beyond borders?

His son describes this prospect as a “utopian fantasy”, and few these days are likely to disagree. The show celebrates a tolerance and sweetness that seem to belong to an alien land. Or perhaps, for a brief period, we are reminded that the theatre is one of the few realms where such ways of being and thinking haven’t yet gone sour.

Between The River and The Sea is at the Royal Court to 9 May.

Photo credit: Between The River and The Sea (Photos by Holly Revell)