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The Fever Chart

Published Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 14:00 by Kevin Berry

The Fever Chart brings the shock and confusion of the Middle East within touching distance. Its characters are tragic and they are profoundly, movingly human. Whatever they are and whoever they are, they need each other.

Naomi Wallace’s play is actually three separate plays, or visions, according to the programme. They are staged almost continuously with short breaks for costume changes. In the first, a Palestinian mother, played with disconcerting calm by Lisa Came, is a persistent, unsettling presence at a zoo guarded by Daniel Rabin’s increasingly puzzled Israeli soldier. The link between them provides a memorably moving image. Radd Rawi’s elderly Russian-Jew meets them. He appears eccentric, almost a buffoon, but there is quiet despair in his soul.

Then in the second vision, a grieving Arab father, the excellent Rawi again, confronts an Israeli nurse who has had a lung transplant.

Wallace’s dialogue has the tone, scope and power of narrative poetry and she uses some striking metaphors. An image of tortoises being crushed by tanks might seem like lazy writing, but not when spoken by Came.

The final vision is a haunting soliloquy spoken by an Iraqi at the time of the first Gulf War. Rabin plays him with ironic charm. He is addressing an international pigeon fancier’s convention - only now, because of the sanctions, he has no pigeons.

Pilot Theatre’s directors create an appropriate atmosphere for each vision. The tension evolves gradually. The revelations surprise rather than shock, which is just as it should be.

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