●●●●○
Oh My Sweet Land was conceived by Molière prize-winning actor Corinne Jaber and Palestinian writer and director Amir Nizar Zuabi after the pair travelled to the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan. Like the character she plays on stage, Jaber is a Syrian-German woman with friends and memories the Syrian conflict has strewn wide across the Middle East. Accordingly, Zuabi has made the play ambitious in its scope. It is a one-act monologue which involves many characters; the stage-set is of a bare kitchen in Germany, yet events occur in Paris, Cairo and Damascus; and the events themselves are pulled by their conflicting ties to romance and family, reportage and art, past and present.
The thread that runs through all of this, and occupies events on stage, is cooking. Kubah is a traditional Syrian meat dish that the woman (Jaber) obsessively attempts to perfect. As she kneads chopped onions and spices into the diced meat, we are told of the “muscle memory” dislocating her mind from the act of cooking. The smell of the frying onions, which drifts over the audience, is her trigger into memories of her search for her lover caught up in the Syrian Revolution. The play is a telling of these memories in a number of harrowing stories. We are told of prisoners packed tight into rooms — about the size of a kitchen tea towel, an item used on-stage as a visual aid — given only 45cm2 per person. However, Zuabi keeps returning to the human capacity to find humour in the ugliest of experiences. The woman tells of being hit to the floor and breaking her nose. As a pool of blood soaks the shoes of her attacker, she jokes that she just missed buying those pointed black boots in the sale.
Similarly, her search for an Egyptian lawyer is a brilliantly acted case of farcical mistaken identity, reminiscent of Comedy of Errors — which, incidentally, Jaber performed in 2012 at the Globe. The guise of theatre, however, falls away when the horror is not counterbalanced with the kindness or humour of the Syrian people, of which the play features many examples, such as the enthusiastic immigrant father, inviting the pedestrians of Munich into his house for coffee. When these moments are lost, Zuabi at once serves politics, not entertainment.
The play ends without the counterbalance of laughter: the fridge door swings open and we see stacks of raw meat yet to become kubah. There is much cooking still to do, there are many stories yet untold. Oh My Sweet Land is a valiant attempt to bring voice and character to the individual among the swathes currently fleeing their own country in a way a news report cannot. However, as the overtly (though perhaps necessarily) crude metaphor of raw meat reminds us, Syria has been redefined by countless deaths and displacement. Against that, laughter, and theatre itself, is very difficult.
Oh My Sweet Land was performed as part of The Abbey Theatre’s Theatre of War Symposium, and is a joint production between the Young Vic and the Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne.
