Nadav Burstein is an Israeli actor and playwright, who is bringing his new play “Rebels and Patriots” to the Edinburgh Fringe this August. Nadav began writing this play when he himself was a teenager conscripted into the Israeli Defence Force, a compulsory national service which most high-school graduates in Israel are expected to fulfil. We asked him about the personal experiences that inspired him to write this piece and the diverse actors he cast to portray his comrades.
Nadav, please can you tell us more about your own personal experiences that inspired you to write Rebels and Patriots?
The play is based on my experiences and those of my closest friends around the time when we were mandatorily conscripted to service in the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). The story explores the period of time when I was in the process of leaving the army. Mandatory conscription for men is 2 years and 8 months (and 2 years for women), and I was drafted to service at 18 years of age. I served for 11 months before getting out. Personal circumstances and the political situation all affected my mental-health severely, and I couldn’t stay any longer, and that’s what the play talks about. I started writing it as notes in my diary while serving. During the last months of my time in the army I read ‘The Myth Of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus, and that book opened my mind to the possibility of creating theatre and offered many answers around some fundamentally existential questions that I had in those confusingly dark times; questions of the meaninglessness of the universe and of suicide. The book inspired a lot of the philosophical questions the play explores, and it is the reason why I chose to train as an actor. During my training, I realised that my own experiences could tell an important story for the stage, one that talks about protest against war, toxic masculinity in the armed forces and self-harm, and mainly, that sheds a light on the complexity of life in Israel and of the struggles young people who are born into an impossible violent reality have to deal with at a very young age.
How do you think this play with resonate with British audiences?
The play talks about one of the most press-covered political conflicts in the world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been on everyone’s front-papers and screens, especially this past year. There’s a big movement in the UK that’s calling for peace in the region and thousands attended protests to stop the horrors in the region this year, which shows that there are many people that care deeply about what’s going on in my home. But it’s been very clear to me this past year that an overwhelming majority of the people who seem to have an opinion about the political situation in Israel and Palestine – from both sides of the political map - know very little about the history of the conflict and the facts around it, and with the aid of social media people have the illusion of knowledge and are presented with an extremely polarized and narrativized glance of what the truth might be. So, I would like to offer our audiences a glance into the real complexity of the situation and challenge them to ask questions about the opinions they might think they have. Apart from the political themes the play deals with, it talks about some extremely important global issues that affect young men worldwide; it explores the lack of capacity young boys have in regards to talking about their struggles and the way that this suppression of feelings can lead to dangerous consequences. It also explores the purpose young people can find in joining an army – even here in the UK, and the mental health implications serving in the armed forces can have on the teenagers enlisted.
What led you to creating your company Floating Shed? What are your goals for the company?
Floating Shed was formed during my training in the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, when Tom Dalrymple, the co-founder of the company, approached me with an idea for a project he wanted to develop. We wanted to create a space for ourselves to develop our creative practice and explore ideas, form, techniques and ways to create. We found an immense passion for multidisciplinary theatre, text-devising and incorporating movement and physical language into our storytelling. So, as we approached graduation we started working on our first production – PASSION; a two-hander exploring homophobia and the damages of conversion therapy. We presented the piece in the Old Joint Stock Theatre in Birmingham in June 2022, and by February 2023 transferred it to the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in London, where it was awarded the OffComm for its short run and received fantastic responses from critics. We knew that while we wanted to push ourselves creatively in the way in which we tell stories, we also knew we wanted to tell difficult political stories that urgently need to be explored and questioned. Our next project in line was Rebels & Patriots, and it was just in time when we met the newest member of Floating Shed: Tarik Badwan. I met Tarik as an actor on a project that he directed for the Camden Fringe called ‘Jerusalem 48’; a show about a post-apocalyptic Jerusalem where governments have collapsed and that examines a survival-based relationship between an Arab and a Jew. Since then, we’ve found a special creative and collaborative relationship and find great strength in working together as an Israeli and a Palestinian. Meeting Tarik couldn’t have happened in better timing. Rebels & Patriots will be Floating Shed’s first long-run show and debut at the Edinburgh Fringe. We want Floating Shed to become a sustainable way for us to make theatre that furthers social impact, we want to keep challenging ourselves in asking what we believe and why we believe in it, and take our audiences on journeys that interrogates what they think is true about the world.
You have a diverse cast for the show – can you explain the importance of portraying different perspectives within the piece?
The different perspectives around conscription in the play came from the real stories and perspectives of myself and my friends growing up in Tel-Aviv, and so when I started writing the play I immediately saw how the complexity of life in Israel was evident through the characters’ relationships. The drama and conflict between those young men and the complex circumstances around them are dramatic in essence. Ultimately, all those characters want to live peacefully in a safe home and are pursuing what is a political truth to them. The core of their individual struggles, and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole, stems around the notion of what safety is and what people are willing to sacrifice in order to defend it as a truth. The play is called ‘Rebels & Patriots’ and I think that the name encapsulates the essence of the piece; Israeli society is a deeply pained one, and the history of the region is one of persecution and war, and so when the characters talk of their different perspectives around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they really show that they’re neither rebels nor patriots. They’re young people in an impossible reality. Our cast is made out of Jewish, Israeli, British and Palestinian creatives, and this constellation means that we sometimes need to have difficult political conversations in the rehearsal room to find out how complicated the things we’re discussing really are. But that’s the key for the importance of our creative relationship; those tough debates are what we need more of in the world. We don’t always have to agree with each other, but we must hear each other’s perspectives and acknowledge each other’s humanity in order to move towards political resolution.
Rebels and Patriots is a multilingual piece of theatre. What challenges did this bring, and how did you overcome them?
The journey of writing Rebels & Patriots is one filled with translations. It started as notes from my time in the IDF that I wrote in Hebrew, and then developed into a play that was also written in Hebrew. But, when I moved to the UK and trained as an actor in English, I immediately translated the piece to English as I was beginning to understand the essence of theatre-making better in an English language context. The play then went between translations another four or five times until I finally decided to write it primarily in the English language. The main challenge was in getting the authenticity it had in Hebrew into an English-speaking audience and portraying the events in a play that can translate the cultural experiences I had in Israel. That’s a very difficult thing to do, because as soon as a piece of writing gets translated, half of its soul can be lost. I’m very lucky to have Floating Shed and to work with text-devising in the way that we do, as we always let the script transform organically when we begin unpicking it in rehearsals. So, we’re finding a version of the story that can be understood as clearly as possible to an English-speaking audience, but we have just enough of the soul Hebrew has injected into the writing, be it by using the language itself or by letting the original language inform the rhythm and feel of the piece.
What more can society, and in particular, the arts do to address the topic of toxic masculinity? Is that an important subject for you?
Toxic masculinity has many faces and can show itself in many forms. I think that the most common version of it is a simple lack of emotional openness that I definitely experienced growing up. The play revolves around a huge problem young men have to face - especially those who are born into unstable societies like the one in Israel. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and daily have to face war, death and violence. The biggest issue is that they are conditioned to be ‘strong’ or ‘Machu’ and to not discuss their struggles with this tough reality, even to their closest friends. I struggled a lot in my time in the army yet rarely had real conversations about my feelings to my friends. The play shows how this can lead to drug abuse and self-harm, and all those are based on real experiences from my life and those of my closest friends from home, so it definitely is very close to my heart, as I’ve seen the damage it can do. Society is slowly learning, but I think that there’s a long way to go. The easiest thing for everyone to do is to check in on their friends, and as simple as it may sound, to constantly remind ourselves that we are inherently emotional. All emotions: sadness, grief, joy and all the million other ones, are what makes us human - so sharing them fully with one another should be a sign of strength, not weakness.
Rebels and Patriots will be performed at 3pm at the Pleasance Courtyard (Upstairs) from 31st July – 25th August
Booking Link: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/rebels-and-patriots
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