Love is a tough job. Especially the love you have for a country.
Pedro Penim is sat in front of his computer, and his face is projected on a screen. It’s hard to say to whom and in the name of whom does he speak: to the audience, to himself, to the object of his love? Israel, here a nation with the shape of fiction, has a human face, like someone with whom one needs to live. Penim identifies the contours of the images we draw of the beloved object – invoking often his personal vision, a Portuguese one, about a theme that concerns all of us.
Pedro Penim is not a Jew, in fact the question of Jewish identity held no particular importance for him up until now. Religious, economic and political interests never led him to identify with Israel. However, his confrontation with the country and its history is deeply personal. “Israel” is a love story for a land which can represent everything: terror and sanctuary, chaos and the garden of Eden, the past. A fascinating interplay between fiction and nation, an archaeological excavation of History and the senses, a declaration which becomes a debate on the object of this love. This is neither a documentary nor a pedagogical approach – apart from Penim’s performance which brings us to this shifting land, where certainty, representations and opinions break down.
Voltaire said one must choose between countries where one sweats and countries where one thinks. In Israel (the country and the Play) one does both at the same time. With no place for boredom. If this play works out as it is supposed to, each individual history will be read as the history of Israel, and the history of Israel will be read as the history of a sole person.
Pedro Penim is a member of Teatro Praga who evoques a theatrical style which combines text and vídeo, performance and installation, philosophy and politics, humor and pain, paradigms of Teatro Praga’s work. An innovative language which bares in mind the boundary between reality and fiction. A panting text, a plain line of reasoning: Israel invites us to get involved in this loving work.