There is drama to be written on the emotive topic of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the occupation of the West Bank.
Unfortunately, the poundingly overwrought Welcome to Ramallah, in which two Jewish sisters spend an evening of enforced truth-telling with a pair of Palestinian men, is not that play.
Mara and Nat and Daoud and his uncle Salim swiftly become a highly strung quartet, as writers Sonja Linden and Adah Kay crank up the tension with precision-drilled predictability.
The playwrights’ passion is admirably unquestionable, but drilling home a checklist of issues in this clumsy way does no one any favours.
The writing style is matched, in Sue Lefton’s wearying production, by much over-emphatic acting.
The debate centres around the ashes of the women’s late father, supposedly to be scattered on a kibbutz in the Galilee.
Yet this land, in Salim’s ancestral village as it naturally turns out, was appropriated by the nascent Israeli state in the conflicts of 1948.
Mara, the one with a conscience, is deeply rattled. Nat, the one with a hairdo, isn’t. The empathy is there, but the execution is somewhere far away.
Until 18 Oct 18 (020 7503 1646). "Pay what you can" tonight.
Welcome To Ramallah
Arcola Theatre
Arcola Street, E8 2DJ
