The Beloved at Bush Theatre

The Beloved at Bush Theatre

29 May, 2012
by: Naima Khan

Amir Nizar Zuabi's new play cleverly weaves global existential questions with the more personal ones in his take on the story of Abraham.

Sheep are a good metaphor for people but in Amir Nizar Zuabi's The Beloved, he takes a huge risk and pushes it much further than I could have imagined. In his reconsideration of the story of Abraham, he introduces sheep as the “keepers of dreams” and the “keepers of stories” and the witnesses to that almost child-sacrifice on the mountain. Here they're a species we've raised and used since biblical times and Zuabi questions how much over the years, these sheep have been using us. 

His play is rooted in family and relationships, in parenthood and war but by using the ambiguous story at the heart of the three Abrahamic faiths, The Beloved continuously alludes to the debate and the destruction that followed the story of the sacrifice for thousands of years. It comes to a head after betrayal and brutality when a squirmy, emotionally tortured Isaac (Rami Heuberger) returns to his father's home as an adult intent on establishing, through the poetic dialogue that flows seductively throughout this play,  exactly what happened to him on that mountain. 

But bizarrely, it's the sheep that make me ask the bigger questions and yet they're the most resolute. By the way I'm talking honest to goodness actors dressed as sheep, who were at first hugely off-putting but completely won me over as they haunt their shepherds, swing from meat hooks and talk about nurture, death and forgiveness while stringing together the descent from Eden, the Big Bang and the Day of Judgement all in the same short, powerful monologue. 

The people, on the other hand, make me question people. With no grand call to the masses, no riches, no fame, Abraham's plight is smaller than expected atop his mountain where his life is contained by his family and his sheep. Their world is quiet and still with an ever-present idea of their precarious position on the military-protected border. Trying to understand the world from this position of isolation has its own issues and within that, there's a child to raise amid these external forces. 

While the perpetually evasive Abraham (Makram J Khoury) doubts his wife (a ballsy Rivka Neumann) and accuses her of mollycoddling his son, in adulthood, Isaac's wife (the unforgettable master stroke that is Sivan Sasson) is the force that drives him towards emotional clarity via more of the thick, beautifully symbolic language heaped in visceral markers that raises this play above most new writing. 

The only thing this production lacks is pace. It's rarely a good sign when the audience doesn't  know the play is over and because Zuabi cleverly mixes quick dialogue with longer monologues, it could be both snappy and contemplative during the plays 70 minutes. Instead, it lags a bit, then speeds up, then lags some more. But while it's an unsettling production, after the play, it's difficult to stop thinking about. 

The Beloved runs at Bush Theatre until 9^th June

The Beloved is a ShiberHur, Young Vic co-production with Bush Theatre and KVS Brussels as part of World Stages London.  

Image by Alastair Muir 

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Naima Khan