Palestinian refugees arrive in region to perform Peter Mortimer play

Sep 19 2009 The Journal

MOST actors prefer not to crawl out of bed until around 11am. For our young Palestinian thespians – aged 12 and 13, rehearsals start at 7.30am, one of this writer’s attempts to combat the effects of Ramadan where from sun up to sunset Muslims are allowed neither food nor drink – not even water. Nor is sex allowed, nor tobacco. Christians used to have a watered-down version of abstinence called Lent, a word most of us only now associate with what happens to a library book.

Ramadan in September means 13 hours’ continuous abstinence daily. One of the Muslims’ own tactics is to eat around 4.30am, and to help them awake, a drummer bangs his noisy way around Shatila refugee camp at a time of day few of us normally experience.

You stagger from bed, eat fruit, cheese and bread, drink juice, then grab a couple more hours’ kip before waking to face the long barren hours. This small pre-sunrise meal is sohur, while eating after sundown is iftar.

It’s 30 degrees on camp and in Himmeh School, Beirut, where we rehearse the play, regular power cuts rob us of the cooling fan in our hothouse room, and also mean the production’s recorded music comes and goes. By 10.30am we are beginning to wilt. Being from cold climes, I allow myself some water to stave off dehydration, but for the young girls there is nothing. They fall asleep on set, grow grumpy, anti-social, and I fear both for them, and the play itself, which is due to open at The Customs House, South Shields, on Wednesday September 23. By 1pm, we are exhausted and rehearsals end, yet another six hours await before they can touch food or liquid.

The trip to the UK of the 10 young female Palestinian actors and five of their teachers is the culmination of my living on the camp for two months last year, and creating with the children a piece of drama based on one of my fables.

They performed it then on camp, and now, with more than £20,000 raised, they will perform it at four venues in the North-East. But returning to Beirut for a week’s rehearsals, I had foolishly not anticipated Ramadan, a time when to conserve energy, Muslims plan for as little activity as possible whereas I am expecting every day several hours of high-performance rehearsals from 12 and 13-year-olds.

My own ‘When in Rome’ philosophy means that the occasional water or tea slurp apart, I also fast during daylight hours. Mid-afternoon, this leaves me wandering the camp in a strange mental and physical state as my body attempts to adjust to its bizarre new routine.

Ramadan is an extra obstacle in creating a play with youngsters whose previous experience of theatre – as performers or audience – is zero and who are staging it in a foreign language (English) of which they have only the slenderest of knowledge. Added to which my own words of Arabic can be contained on a cigarette packet. No matter. The anticipation of the performances to come somehow drag us all through the weariness, the shortened tempers, the often airless room where there are no blinds or curtains to cut out the relentless sun, conditions I suspect the RSC rarely have to endure.

The play will go on because, as the phrase has it, in Beirut or Tyneside, at Ramadam or on Whit Tuesday, the play’s the thing.

Croak The King and a Change in the Weather opens at The Customs House, South Shields on Wednesday and is also playing at The Saville Exchange, North Shields, Bellingham Town Hall, and The Sage Gateshead.