After our excellent experience seeing Returning To Haifa on Friday…
Returning To Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, Finborough Theatre, 9 March 2018
…we were really looking forward to the other piece running concurrently at the Finborough, Checkpoint Chana, but we found it comparatively disappointing.
The topic is interesting – an academic/poet accused of making anti-Semitic references in one of her poems. But as a play it really didn’t work. The poet is also meant to be a soak – so there’s a lot of soak-laden drama involved, which tends to leave us cold.
There’s a lot of telling rather than showing in this play – which tilts it towards melodrama.
I thought it was almost a good short play, but could have done with a heavy prune/edit/revision. Janie really didn’t like it and thought the whole thing beyond redemption.
Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.
A search term that finds the reviews – mostly middling – can be found here.