Amos Gitai stages ‘House’ to tell the complexity of the Middle East

A series of monologues in 5 languages, accompanied by the noise of cutting stones and building a house, and music that at times forcefully bursts into the story, capturing the attention and emotions of the spectators. The two and a half hours of House, Amos Gitai’s show on stage at the Teatro Argentina for the Romaeuropa festival thus, in the harshness of the story of some (the Israeli inhabitants) and others (the ancient owners and the builders, both Palestinian), incompatible points of view and world visions of people of opposing cultures who perished share the uprooting from their respective places of origin. A group of exceptionally talented actors and musicians alternate with different voices and languages ​​(French, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish), high-impact instruments and percussion in a simulated construction site with metal scaffolding and rectangular white stone bricks. In the background, a large video reproduces the activity taking place on one side of the stage or another seen from a perspective different from that of the audience, and then albums of old photos of families with sad destinies, displaced persons from Palestine or victims of the Holocaust, and black and white images of war and reconstruction. The complexity of the Middle East is represented on stage, which has resulted in the ongoing conflict.

The first minutes of the show are dedicated to the director’s mother, Efratia, born in British Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century and who died 20 years ago, who from the screen reads to her son a letter written while he was in the kibbutz where he grew up, far from she who had chosen Europe. Amos Gitai first told the story of a house in West Jerusalem way back in 1980, with a documentary (the first of a trilogy) which cost him the ostracism of the Israeli government, followed by the choice to move to the United States to finish university (he is an architect by training) and then to Paris; he will return to Tel Aviv in 1995 but his creative activity will remain very critical of the government and inspired by pacifism and awareness of the need for coexistence between the two peoples.

After the film Why War presented in Venice, this show also seeks the origins of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East in history. In the film, we start from a correspondence from the 1930s between Einstein and Freud. The theatrical scene instead retraces the history of a house in Jerusalem, inhabited before 1948 by a wealthy Palestinian family, then occupied by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and subsequently purchased by the most recent generations of Israelis. Everyone tells their own stories, their own reasons, and the series of monologues culminates in powerful sound scenes in which instruments and singing voices emphasize the tension of the theme. In the cast, we recognize the French actress Irene Jacob, made famous in her youth by the films of the Polish director Kieslowski, but also protagonist of Why war as well as mother of the young revelation actor Paul Kircher, together with interpreters from various places in the Middle East .