'Return to Haifa': It had been a long time since we felt such a dense silence in a theater

There is a theatre of entertainment, the most abundant; a theatre of art, as Stanislavski said; there is a theatre of agitation and propaganda (agitprop) linked to politics, and there is a theatre of urgency that rescues the voice of those silenced by the horror of war. This is the case of Return to Haifa, which opens the mini-cycle Beating for Palestine at the Heartbreak Hotel. Because the place where you are born marks not only childhood but also the future of life, as happens with the Palestinian people. (“Man is what he fights for,” says the Jewish boy.)

Ghassan Kanafani (1936, Acre — 1972 Beirut) is one of the most prestigious Palestinian writers. An author with a double literary commitment (six novels, several short story collections, three plays, and three essay books) and political commitment (founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), armed with only a pen and assassinated by the Mossad at the age of 36 in a bombing that also killed his niece.

Return to Haifa is a painful portrait of a world shaken by war, by the domination of man over man, by the humiliation of an entire people. A narrative about the construction of identity, about the rescue of memory and the concept of homeland. Kanafani explains, he does not judge, even though the conclusions are clear. There is no rage in the face of desolation. There is no violence. There are words. A great achievement of Kanafani is to have put on paper then a question that has been repeated quite a bit in the wake of the invasion of Gaza: how the victims of the Holocaust become executioners. Executioners of this Palestinian couple who return to Haifa twenty years after being expelled from their home and deported by English and Jewish troops in 1948. They not only lost their home, but they were separated from a six-month-old baby whom they have never seen again.

The play begins as the narration of a story, but it quickly inverts and the characters manifest themselves, always, of course, with the restraint and naturalness that Àlex Rigola currently imbues his shows with. And indeed, it has been a long time since we heard such a dense silence in a theatre. Magnificent are the four performers who bring us a reflection so bitter that it inevitably, and fortunately, invites us to think. Do not miss it.