The Gazan Women
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh
★★★☆☆

IS community theatre critic-proof? Do those good intentions and best efforts by a non-professional cast place them beyond reproach? Do we as an audience have no escape from obligatory solidarity?

There’s a kind of coercion going on in Art27 Scotland’s production, The Gazan Women, that leaves you uneasy.

While the concept is excellent — to take The Supplicants, Aeschylus’s drama of women escaping persecution and seeking refuge in a foreign state, and to update it to Gazan refugees in Scotland — the script and direction seem inadequate. If that’s too harsh a word, then at least insufficiently developed.

There’s a playful, fairytale quality to the set up. The convivial Ghazi Hussein, himself a Palestinian from the Wet Bank, acts as oriental vizier to the Scottish authority, a “king” played with a Duke of Buccleuch mixture of concern and urbane detachment by Alan Caig Wilson. There’s a coup de theatre when the backstage curtain is drawn back o reveal a window crammed with refugees who invade the stage. And there’s a sense of the dialectic of classic Greek drama — we the audience will need to make a decision, like a jury, and the fate of these people rests on our consent.

All this sets up dramatic potential, but over the next two hours it is squandered, as though the enterprise had lost its nerve.

In Aeschylus the women are foreigners and pursued by those who wish to claim them and rape them. To create a script the co-writer Farah Ashour conducted interviews in Gaza itself, interrogating what life was like before genocide and after, and whence comes their sense of strength, dignity and normality.

This becomes a list of more or less familiar and homogenous responses that the cast struggle to invest with the individuality of the people interviewed. The ones who succeed best are the kids, Rayyan Mustapha, Mila and Mourad Ebied, along with the only Arabic-speaking woman in the cast whose words need onstage translation, a convention that works perfectly.

But this list of comments, authentic as their provenance might be, feels filtered and sanitised. The women just want to be wives in patriarchal households. No-one has an atom of political insight. The word Hamas is entirely absent, even if the word Zionist creeps in.

And yet — as the size of the audience and the sold-out run demonstrate — this production lands full-square within a genuine public hunger for theatre that reports from Gaza.

Why not allow the otherness of the women to un-nerve us? Why make them compliant and submissive rather than independent minded and revolutionary? The more we are unsettled then the more significant becomes the choice (or not) to give them refuge, the choice we are invited to make.

There is huge potential here, with this strange and fascinatingly varied cast, to go beyond even the issue of Gaza and to make a show that tests something deeper still and more urgent: the public capacity for hospitality. I, for one, hope that this company can step beyond sentimentality into something dramatic and important.

Runs until May 17. For more information see: scottishstorytellingcentre.com