Here’s something impartial enough even for the BBC. Plonter, meaning "tangle", is a rough-and-ready, occasionally bewildering but always compelling tragicomic snapshot of life on both sides of that ominous security fence in modern Israel.
Devised by director Yael Ronen and a nine-strong company of Jewish and Arab actors from the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, it uses loosely interlinked scenes to explore the wretched consequences when a Palestinian child is killed by Israeli forces on a practice manoeuvre.
One of its strengths is the way it unfussily encompasses a spectrum of viewpoints from moderate to extreme. Even the best-intentioned folk stumble in a fog of mutual misunderstanding and previously peaceable families start to tear at each other when disaster strikes. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when boisterous children invent a new game: playing martyrs.
There’s the usual problem with badly positioned surtitles. But the Theatre of the Absurd-esque construction of a section of that fence through a family’s living room, forcing them to seek permission from the border guard to go to the bathroom, needs no translation.
Plonter until 7 February (020 7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk).
Plonter
Barbican: The Pit
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
