Nir Paldi stars in Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Ballad of the Burning Star
During their period of compulsory national service, which kicks in at the age of 18, most Israelis serve in the military. When Nir Paldi was conscripted, he didn’t undertake combat training. He directed a production of Hair, the musical.
“It’s hilarious,” Paldi says. “There’s this youth regiment in the Israeli army that works in collaboration with the ministry of education, and we were part of that, directing theatre for teenagers in deprived areas of the country. Now I think – and I did a bit at the time – that it’s terrible. It’s horrible. It’s about integrating the army more and more into everyday life, putting soldiers in uniform next to children. But that’s how I directed Hair. We did a shortened version: [the lead character] goes to the army and dies in Vietnam, comes back in a coffin, you know?
“It became absurd. I’m in a uniform doing something that’s very anti-military.”
It’s just that sort of absurd tension that make Ballad of the Burning Star so fascinating. The latest production by Theatre Ad Infinitum, of which Paldi is co-artistic director, was a hit in Edinburgh last year, has been touring nationally and opens at Battersea Arts Centre tonight. The show uses a fairly typical Israeli life story, loosely based on Paldi’s own, as the line on which to hang a provocative and affecting exploration of the troubling paradoxes of everyday life in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The insistent pounding of history rumbles under family squabbles, and the lethal force of either side’s combatants can rip into normal life at any moment.
Just as compelling as the subject matter is the form the show takes, a kind of Brechtian cabaret style of continual alienation and self-commentary. Don’t get too comfortable.
Paldi drags up as Star, the story’s hero and narrator, who works alongside a five-strong troupe of women who enact the other roles and perform musical numbers as the story progresses. Well, “works alongside” is diplomatic: politically liberal instincts notwithstanding, Star is a tyrannical director, browbeating her performers and occasionally spectators as the mood takes her. “Stop crying!” she barks at a hapless performer doing a perfectly reasonable job as a grieving relative. “It’s not a soap opera! It’s a serious political piece!” The flow of power between star, company and audience is in constant flux and in constant tension with the subject matter. Everyone in the room can and will be wrongfooted on a regular basis – an approach that Paldi feels conveys the fundamentally precarious nature of life in a region soaked in blood.
“We all have this trauma in us,” he says of his home country. “I wanted to speak about the complexity, the layers of thoughts and emotions that you experience as a person living in this situation if you are not an extremist. If you are an extremist, your life is much simpler. If you sympathise with all sides, your life is much more complex because you understand it’s people living their stories. They grow up with their histories and horrible things have happened to people from both sides for generations. So I wanted to create this atmosphere in the room and that is where I arrived at cabaret – something is happening right now, not only in the story that we’re telling but in the format of the storytelling, so that the show is collapsing on itself.
“The show is confused. The person who wrote it [that is, Star] is confused. She’s crumbling before our eyes. It’s a big mess, which I feel is the reality in this place.”
From the ages of two to 13, Paldi grew up in an Israeli settlement in occupied Palestinian territory, “an extremely right-wing environment that I always felt oppressed in”. After his musically-oriented military service, he went to art school in Tel Aviv, then lived in Paris and moved to London in 2007. Theatre Ad Infinitum found success soon after with productions like 2008’s Behind the Mirror – a kind of love triangle between a woman, a man and his reflection – and 2011’s Translunar Paradise, which used masks and movement in a story of grief and fantasy and has toured internationally to huge acclaim.
“We try to flip our style on its head every time,” Paldi says. “We don’t really have a style, which I guess is a style in itself.”
Ballad of the Burning Star began as a fairly conventional piece of physical-theatre storytelling with Paldi telling the audience about his life but “it was too safe. It had to be much more direct but at the same time I needed more distance from it.” That’s where drag and cabaret came in. Paldi’s Star persona could be “a massive mask that allows me to say whatever the fuck I want as the village fool” while allowing him to change elements of his own life that were “not interesting enough”. Paldi offers “a banal example: when my school class went to visit Auschwitz, my mum didn’t think I should go, not in that context. And I didn’t go. So in the first version of the play, he doesn’t go to Auschwitz. Then I was like, ‘This is really stupid! Of course he goes to Auschwitz!’”
The story has become more universal and more extreme, at least to British eyes, though experiences such the loss of family members to concentration camps, terrorism or military violence are well within the bounds of normal Israeli and Palestinian life. Ballad of the Burning Star underlines the awful absurdity of trying to normalise such trauma within society. And the ideal vehicle for expressing this absurdity turns out to be cabaret: “Brecht and the whole German shebang,” as Paldi puts it, allow the teller to undermine her own tale, take her performers to task for doing their duty, and chastise her audience for sitting and watching the spectacle of her attempt to cram the tragedy of history into a song-and-dance show.
“You see me shouting at the musician: ‘Play the Nazi music!’ You know? It just charges the room.”
The Ballad of the Burning Star is at Battersea Arts Centre from tonight until March 8. It’s then at Unity Theatre, Liverpool, on March 11-12 and Lakeside Theatre, University of Essex, on March 13.
