Grey Rock premiered at La MaMa in New York earlier this year, and though the story achieves take-off in a literal sense, this whimsical, soapie-like work from Palestinian playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi does lose fuel performed in English rather than Arabic.
Still mourning the death of his wife, retired TV repairman Yusuf (Khalifa Natour) has hatched a quixotic secret plan: building the first Palestinian rocket to the Moon in his backyard shed. He finds an eager apprentice in Fadel (Ivan Azazian), but as their impossible dream takes shape, the secret becomes hard to hide from Yusuf’s daughter Lila (Fidaa Zaidan) and her risk-averse fiance (Alaa Shehada).
They each react differently to the secret, and as Yusuf finds time to meddle lightly in Lila’s romantic life, a love triangle emerges. Romantic sit-com blends with other, more sketch-like elements, including an off-beat scene where Yusuf seeks blessing from a local imam (Motaz Malhees) to house the rocket in the minaret of a nearby mosque.
But the feelgood premise comes with a melancholy twist as the true cost of the mission is revealed.
In an interview with The New York Times, Zuabi admitted that asking his cast to perform in English “was like asking them to swim with their hands tied behind their backs and legs weighted”, and it certainly sounds that way in performance.
Read the review by Cameron Woodhead in The Age.