Last year political comic Mark Thomas was the first man to walk the entire length of the 750km Israeli West Bank Barrier. Can he get a good comedy show out of it? Emma McAlpine finds out.
"You can't just bung a bobble hat on and yomp off," so begins Mark Thomas in his new show about walking the length of the Israel West Bank barrier. The political comedian or 'bourgeois radical' as he self-deprecatingly describes himself, decided to walk the wall last year to understand what life was like for both the Palestinians and Israelis living either side of it. On his first day he gets arrested, before being tear-gassed and almost stoned (the painful kind). It certainly beats the Three Peaks Challenge.
More a humorous traveller's yarn than a stand-up show, punchlines are few but there are laughs to be had, namely from Thomas' comical impressions of the characters he meets along the way, from his 'sorter' and saviour lawyer Nava to the "dryer than the Swiss navy" British Consulate General. Even he becomes a caricature in the story, morphing into a Hugh Grant-type buffoon whenever his team land in hot water.
Although he admits that his sympathies are predominantly with the Palestinians before his trip, Thomas is keen to understand the conflict from both sides. He gets a rude education. Every Palestinian who wants to cross the wall to work in Israel has to give up quarter of their wages for an exploitative 'permit', while many of the Israeli soldiers are just conscripted kids. He comes across Palestinian children who are stoned by Israeli settlers on their way to school but then gets stoned by Palestinians himself. It's a fascinating and, in places depressing, snapshot of life by the wall, with no easy solution in sight.
Yet, for every desperate situation he comes across, there are also moments of beauty and comedy to counterbalance them. A trip to a zoo reveals a stuffed giraffe with green ping pong balls eyes, restored with “more love than precision” by an amateur taxidermist. And, despite the ugliness of the region with its never-ending concrete wall, barbed wire and military posts, he manages to discover a surprising “pastoral idyll” behind the trappings of war.
Thomas is a gifted performer: one minute shouting and wildly gesticulating to illustrate a particularly funny anecdote, the next lowering his voice and steadying his movements to underline a grave statistic. It's a peculiar blend of comedy and tragedy and he manages to get the balance just right.
While the journey has ultimately been a frustrating and fruitless one, Thomas has done what he set out to do and enlightened himself on both sides of the conflict, by talking to the people involved first hand. It’s not an easy subject for a comedy show but by humanising it, and showing us a different world to the one so often depicted in the media, he manages to paint a funny and insightful picture of a grave situation.
Mark Thomas: Extreme Rambling - Walk The Wall is at the Tricycle Theatre until Saturday the 28th May.
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