Review: Oh My Sweet Land

Oh My Sweet Land

Peacock Theatre

***

It’s strange, perhaps even alarming, that we, the distant witnesses to ongoing calamity, will not feel involved without a direct appeal. Something like this happens in Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play, set against the civil war in Syria, now staged as part of the Abbey Theatre’s Theatre of War Symposium. When a Syrian-German woman travels closer to her ancestral home, she encounters one well-intended but bizarre act of charity: a room full of electric fans in Jordan, donated by the Irish Red Cross. The fans aren’t popular. Most people in Bushra don’t have electricity.

Actually, the text has been altered for a Dublin audience (the Swiss refugee council donated the fans in Zuabi’s published script), but it’s a telling gesture in this co-production from the Young Vic and Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne, which is everywhere determined to bring the conflict closer to home. That is also the journey of Corinne Jaber’s protagonist, drawn almost instinctually towards her motherland, partly to bear witness to its displacement and horror, partly to find her place in this mess.

We find Jaber in her kitchen in Paris, a bare space in muted Gallic whites and greys, where she begins to cook kubah, her grandmother’s Syrian meat dish, for which Jaber seeks to create “a perfect skin”. As she cooks, and the heady scents of spice and flesh permeate the auditorium, her story is made both mechanical and sensuous, as it folds detached reportage into poetic metaphor. In pursuit of a lover, Ashraf, an exiled Syrian in Paris who disappears to help refugees, she occupies several roles, a detective, a reporter, a pilgrim, a moth to the flame.

There are grimly appropriate reasons that displacement should be the narrative of the Syrian conflict: nearly 8m people have been uprooted, more than 3m have fled to neighbouring countries. “Everyone tells me his story,” says Jaber, a roving recorder of suffering: a woman’s husband survives an horrific attack only to be killed later in hospital; a little girl is happy she no longer has worms in her head wounds; an actor narrowly escapes execution through quick thinking; a reporter evades capture by faking his own funeral.

The detail is vivid and acrid, but Zuabi, who also directs, is more aesthete than provocateur. The punctured holes of a shelled building resemble lace, “like concrete lingerie”; Jaber’s onstage cooking, evincing carnage through chopping, pummelling and sizzling, becomes a studied frame and a structure; and so the disorientation of war is conveyed far too neatly, prepped and served. A disarming sequence, on the other hand, in which Jaber walks through a devastated watermelon patch, is more startling for what it leaves out. It’s there, in revulsion and confusion, that our conscience is snagged and sharpened.