Mark Thomas: Showtime From The Frontline
Mark Thomas has constructed performance around subjects as diverse as opera, betrayal, dissent and sheds. He is never less than engaging – his last show was essentially chatting to the audience for an hour and was still hugely entertaining – but he is at his best when tackling challenging subjects. There can surely be few more challenging than the West bank, something he explored with sensitivity and remarkable even handedness in his book Extreme Rambling.
Showtime from the Frontline is a sequel, of sorts, to the book, and focuses on a commitment he made to set up a comedy club in that beleaguered part of the world. So far, so Mark Thomas, but it’s a measure of both the man and the difficulties involved that he battled for a further three years before managing to turn the idea into a reality. Alighting upon the Jenin refugee camp, home to the Jenin Freedom Theatre, as a sensible base for the club, or (as he begrudgingly admitted) something that might better be described as a comedy workshop, Thomas set about training a disparate bunch of hopefuls on how to be comic for a night.
What set the evening apart from his previous work – shifting it from the amusingly abstract to the unsettlingly real - was the inclusion on stage of two of his most promising students. Standing in for their colleagues with a mix of scarfs, hats and sunglasses, as well as representing themselves, Faisal Abu Alhayjaa and Alaa Shehada projected an infectious enthusiasm and not a little excitement at performing with Thomas, whose evident reciprocal affection lent the evening a camaraderie that was something of a departure for a man so used to performing solo shows.
As we watched classes proceeding and talents being honed, there was much knockabout fun on stage, while Thomas’s linking narrative was imbued with his usual wit. Yet for all the good humour, egged on by the reflexive laughter from an on-side audience, the grim reality of the Freedom Theatre’s context was never far from the mind. This is Thomas’s great skill – the ability to sheath an important, sometimes shocking, message within the velvet glove of comedy. While laughing at the eccentricity of the club’s pupils, we caught glimpses of refugees holding on to the keys of abandoned houses, of the nonviolent protest of the hunger strike, of the assassination of the theatre’s founder. A master class in multi-media agitprop, Thomas’s presentation stealthily guided his audience as deftly as his class of comedy hopefuls, so that by the half way mark we were already not only entertained, but indelibly educated.
It was perhaps inevitable, and probably quite right, that the evening would turn to the show that we had watched being prepared, but the gear change from complex, layered theatre to straight ahead stand up was not without its problems - the lengthy, and somewhat overcooked, parody of the committee charged with authorising the show being an early signal of a change of direction and pace. The selected film clips that followed, of the performers speaking in their own tongue to an empathic home audience were deeply resonant and affecting, but the decision to have Alhayjaa and Shehada perform their routines live and in full worked less well. They were, after all, delivering material intended for a likeminded audience that shared their life experiences and challenges. Their winning personalities earned supportive chuckles, but that reaction begun to feel a tad synthetic as the routines (and Thomas’s compere shtick) laboured on. With evident generosity he clearly wanted the spotlight to shine on his protégés and their own material (it would be a mean spirited person that denied them that pleasure) but it was, frankly, at the cost of the play’s momentum.
Thomas has been open in the past about “shaping” his experiences – in an early incarnation of “the Red Shed” he went so far as to halt proceedings and ask his audience whether they wanted a good story or the truth – and judicious pruning (this was, after all, a preview performance) would undoubtedly have made for a sharper, better paced second half. But if that was at the cost of Alhayjaa’s and Shehada’s contribution, would he be sacrificing a greater and more honourable intent? I’m still not sure.
Whatever direction he chooses to take, his abiding message will surely remain intact, something he addressed in a powerful closing homily that stressed the importance of subversion and wit in defiance of oppression. Notwithstanding his knowing self-mockery, that it’s not all about him, one would have to add the importance of overwhelming kindness allied to simple integrity, qualities Mark Thomas ably demonstrated in abundance.
