Theatre of war - Palestinian National Theatre

THE woman snapped her fingers at me. As I stood at the customs corral at David Ben-Gurion airport at Tel Aviv, I was astonished to be treated like an errant puppy by a young customs officer, a girl perhaps in her mid-twenties with an abundance of curly blonde hair. "Look at me! I'm talking to you!" she bellowed, and snaps her fingers again.

I had in fact momentarily taken my eyes off her to look in my jacket pocket for a document I'd mentioned, and she had demanded from me, explaining my business in Israel.

This, I should add, occurred after a good hour of queuing and passing through the most elaborate security X-ray machines I'd ever seen, then having my small, if overstuffed, flight bag packed and unpacked several times for a further hour at this corral. All this after I'd been asked to turn on and off my laptop, and display its various functions to the point where I became convinced this woman was interested in purchasing the same model. Its battery was nearly flat by the time I moved on.

"And what," she demanded triumphantly, as if she had uncovered, at the umpteenth sweep of my bag, a black ball with a lit fuse protruding from it, "is this?" Gingerly, she pushed my old-fashioned cassette recording device across the counter with a extended finger, as if it might sprout wings and take flight about the departure hall at any moment.

"You say you are a Scottish journalist – what newspaper are you working for?" "The Scotsman." "The Scotsman? I've never heard of such a newspaper. Why would it be named The Scotsman?" she asked incredulously.

It was about this point that I realised that Amir Nizar Zuabi, director of the Palestinian National Theatre's Jidariyya, was a master of understatement. The day before, he had described Israeli security precautions as "neurotic", yet, as any psychiatrist knows, there is a dangerous point where neurosis flips into psychosis. The line that divided the two seemed a long way behind this customs officer. No reasonable person would quarrel with the need for strict security in a country as troubled as Israel, but the impression remains with me that my treatment at the hands of this public official had little to do with passenger safety. The fact that I was a journalist, a profession that has become unpopular with the Israeli authorities for obvious reasons over recent times was, I believe, at the heart of all the finger-snapping, and spurious questioning of the obvious.

What Palestinian people I've met over the years have complained to me about most frequently is not so much the violence, dispossession or injustice in their situation, though these are often mentioned. Most often, it was the pure inconvenience of their position, the inability to get on with everyday life, that vexes them. I had experienced only a tiny fraction of this inconvenience in the farce at Ben-Gurion Airport.

I recalled the day before, sat upon the sun-drenched balcony of a pleasant Tel Aviv café, vegetable couscous and coffees between us, Zuabi's take on the political situation of Palestinians. "We sometimes tend to reduce ourselves to the conflict, the situation, and it's hard not to because that's the prism you live your life through. You open a door and there's a wall. You can be very artsy and say, 'I'll ignore the wall, a man lives within himself', and so on, but when you need a carton of milk, there's a wall."

It seems astonishing, given the situation of these people, that a body called the National Theatre of Palestine should exist at all. Zuabi, a handsome young man of about 30, exhibits a peculiar mixture of modesty and pride in describing it. "It's still a struggle," he says. "The title 'the National Palestinian Theatre' is much bigger than what it really is. It's a rundown place, has hardly any finance, and, of course, theatre needs a very strong infrastructure. But at the same time, maybe because of that, a lot of the theatre scene in Palestine, which is really just me and six other people, it's tiny, can turn that into an advantage. The theatre is very new, there isn't a strict tradition, so there's this freedom to do whatever you want. I can't imagine Jidariyya done anywhere with that big theatre structure you get in most places, because it's too wacky."

Added to the lack of resources, the personal peril of attempting to run a theatre in Ramallah are illustrated by this young man's early career. "We opened it in very turbulent times – it was basically a war zone," he says.

"At the beginning it started out motivated by the importance of keeping the theatre open, but at the same time we had a lot to say. We were going through this unbelievably confusing, frightening time. We were going through the same thing as our audience, so we were able to make a link with them."

One piece even toured, but the good fortune of the theatre didn't last: "When we got back, the situation here deteriorated rapidly. There was the incursion into Ramallah and we had to stop everything. I was just coming out with a new show, a real big-scale theatre show of a kind we hadn't done before, and in tech (technical rehearsal] week we had to leave everything and run away … When we came back the moment had gone. It was three years into the intifada and as you can imagine we were exhausted."

One of a dozen or so shows produced during the interim was picked up for a run in London. Eventually A Life From Palestine: Stories Under Occupation ran at the Old Vic in London, and Zuabi stayed there for just over a year, during which time he began working on Jidariyya.

"Wacky" might be one word to describe a piece that promises an explosion of visual imagery to accompany its poetic language, but the text is clearly a lot more than that. Mahmoud Darwish's original epic poem, here adapted for stage by Khalifah Natour, is also a seminal text in contemporary Palestinian literature. In it, a poet finds himself recovering from heart surgery, hovering between life and death. The protagonist segues into an immense internal monologue, in which language, custom and land, the big political issues of the Palestinian people, are mixed with the kind of personal questions that any aged man confronting his mortality might ask.

The politics, Zuabi explains, need to be combined in this text with a demonstration that the Palestinians are ordinary people with ordinary aspirations, and that these quotidian desires shared by most of humanity should not be buried under our perceptions about Palestine as a troubled place. "As a director I keep trying to find the right balance. It was important to us to make a show that is very political, but not political on a flat note," he explains.

"We're about that, but it's OK to show ourselves as much more complex and more interesting and more profound than just a conflict. Our struggle for independence is for normal life and not for the struggle itself. It's a cause, not the aim. Sometimes even we Palestinians tend to forget that, when you're in it all day. When you're stuck in a checkpoint that's how it seems – like it's the whole thing, so your life is reduced to that."

Beyond this, the piece explores Zuabi's reflections on his Galilean background. Removed from his home in childhood, the poet talks about the many associations that accrue to the land of his origin. "It's very rooted in the culture of this place, of this country," Zuabi explains. "This country has always been a crossing point; basically we've always been a gate, and people come and go. If you go to Jerusalem and look at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it's mind-blowing because you see a layer of Byzantium, then the Crusaders, then a succession of other cultures; everyone who was here left something here and moved on. Something in the Palestinian culture, absorbed all of this.

"We're much bigger than what you get it reduced to in the news flashes – we're much bigger than the intifada – it's like reducing the UK to the coal strikes. This culture absorbed everything, a lot of the time without digesting what it swallowed, but it's there in the background, it echoes in the things that people do. And this piece echoes everything, in our cuisine, the bounty, not the war bounty, but the bounty of the land. It's very sensual because of that. It's a sensuality that Northern countries are less familiar with, you don't have this warmth, the figs and olives. So that's there, and the words and heritage of everyone that was here is in it. You get bits from the Koran, and the New Testament, and the Old Testament. It's all in there in this unbelievable mix.'

Zuabi advises audiences to allow the sights and sounds of this poetic piece to flow over them. "Read the subtitles if you wish, but don't miss the sound of the words and poetry." Like Darwish, Zuabi is originally Galilean and thinks of a language he's passionate to preserve. "The accents are there. I kept thinking of my grandmother and the smell of her hands after she'd been making bread, the sour dough. The fact that my grandmother was very organic, and without knowing it, spoke in poetry. She'd say: 'Ah, I remember that summer in '48 when the men disappeared like a sip of cold water down the throat.' It's a complete perfect image. A very powerful one.

"That Palestine, which is not about occupation, it was there before, it was a very agricultural society with a very rich traditional life. That's what I want to bring audiences in Edinburgh."

• Jidariyya by the Palestinian National Theatre is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 14-17 August, 8pm, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.