Over the past three decades, approximately fifty plays concerning the Israeli Palestinian conflict have premiered on the British stage, including Naomi Wallace’s one-act A State of Innocence. In this article, I examine Wallace’s play in order to shed light on her attempt to offer a hopeful theatrical alternative to the political situation in this foreign space. Set in a dream-like and spectral version of the ruined Rafah Zoo in the Gaza Strip, A State of Innocence focuses on a bond created between a Palestinian woman and an Israeli soldier. Wallace, who is open in her sympathies for the Palestinian cause, aims to intervene (within the confines of drama) in the contemporary realities of Israel/Palestine, to transcend its full-of-strife circumstances. This daring aesthetic-political endeavour particularly deserves attention because it brings to the fore a tension between art and politics that persists across many plays on the conflict. As I demonstrate, Wallace’s dramaturgical strategies evoke Jill Dolan’s concept of the utopian performative and rely on venerating the Palestinian woman. However, in creating a utopian vision, Wallace’s play also becomes unwittingly aligned with an Israeli-Zionist outlook. In the end, A State of Innocence exemplifies how ideology can be confounded by mimetic art.
Alon Ben-Porat (Sun,) studied this question.
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