Review: HOUSE, Barbican

Memory is like a cloud in Amos Gitaï’s House; from a distance the image is discernible. Reach out to touch it though, and it dissipates into vapour.

A single house in the Middle East is the focal point in this stage adaption of the Israeli-French filmmaker’s documentary trilogy from La Colline - Théâtre National. Borders, identities, geographies, cultures and people change, and yet its four walls remain the same. It starts life in the hands of one of Palestine’s aristocratic families. Today the son of a holocaust survivor, is renovating in search for a home for the future. He employs Palestinian workers. Chiselling at stone blocks they confide in us their own fears of displacement. Over the two hours the blocks are worn down into rubble, an ominous hint at the violence woven into the fabric of the region.

Needless to say, an attempt to visualise the Israel-Palestine conflict is a Herculean task – how to condense the unspeakable pain, and balance the seemingly irreconcilable into two hours? Gitaï’s answer is not to wade in, but to gently dip a toe into the murky waters.

An ensemble of characters confess their personal histories with us as if we are guzzling coffee together in a café. The audience are involved - it’s up to us to stick the images together to build a collage. One in search of his childhood home. One tracing their Jewish ancestry across Europe. Another haunted by the scars of war.

It’s the parallels that emerge that are the most tender. The need for solace, stability, the longing for peace that unites the seemingly polarised voices each narrated in their own language, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Yiddish. Scaffolding towers above them, a spider’s web formed of steel. A fitting image to capture the entangled complexity of interweaving cultural threads.

The patchwork vision ebbs and flows, but its overly meditative approach lacks focus or real dramatic foundation to propel itself across the run time. Its cyclical nature frustratingly builds to nothing, although I suspect that is an admission that there are no answers, just more cycles of argument, of violence, of war. Overly static sequences mean that two and a half hours, without an interval, becomes demanding, even if we have a duty to always keeping listen.

House runs at the Barbican until 28 September

Photo Credit: Simon Gosselin
 

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