Between the River and the Sea

Last Updated on April 21, 2026

4.0 out of 5.0 stars

Personal politics on stage at Jerwood Theatre Upstairs

‘I’m not going to talk about October 7, I’m not going to talk about the war in Gaza. I’m going to talk about my divorce,’ Yousef Sweid informs the audience in his opening paragraph. The audience laughs – partly relieved and partly amused – because the play’s title, Between the River and the Sea, suggests an evening of politics. There turns out to be plenty of politics, but this play is about the intersection of the personal and the political. It is not a flag-waving production, although flags are waved – both the Palestinian and Israeli, one in each hand. The play is about family, identity, love and loss.

The protagonist is a man facing a custody battle in Berlin, where he has been living since moving to Germany with his first wife, a Jewish Israeli theatre director who was offered work at the Maxim Gorky theatre. He was raised in the Israeli city of Haifa, and describes himself as an Arab, Israeli, Palestinian Christian who is raising two Jewish Israeli- Arab Palestinian children who have Christian and Austrian as well as Romanian roots (relatives of their mother are Holocaust survivors). This nuanced complexity of identity arising from one of the most divisive political hotspots in the world is a welcome antidote to the for-or-against rhetoric to which we have become accustomed.

Running at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at Royal Court, Between the River and the Sea is an hour-long, one-man show, co-written by Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlack. Sweid is the actor while Sedlack is the director. The play they have created is serious and funny in equal measure, poignant, sad and full of love and loss.

Sweid describes his morning routine, getting his young daughter to kindergarten and his son to school. He speaks to them in Hebrew and switches to Arabic when his sister calls. While Yemeni rockets fall in Tel Aviv and Israel bombs Syria, he goes off to a meeting with his German divorce lawyer. His ex-wife (from his second divorce) wants to take their daughter to live in Israel.

The lawyer is incensed that she could think about taking a child to a country ‘where babies are being killed next door’. Sweid lets no one off the hook in this conflict and challenges the lawyer about German arms sales to Israel. The British audience, too, is reminded of how Britain gave Palestine to the Jews while promising it to the Arabs and that thanks to the British, the Middle East has been at war ever since.

The script constantly returns to comedic truths about his characters’ lives. His politically minded father lives in Canada and insists that he take a stand on the war in Gaza. His father, he tells us, ‘escaped Israel not because the Zionists were hunting him’, but fled due to tax fraud and the money he owed to the black market. The 4-year-old child at a mixed kindergarten who calls him ‘a stinky Arab’ – the first time he had any idea he was Arab – is caught as an adult smuggling drugs from Lebanon into Israel. ‘So in the end he developed a good relationship with the Arabs,’ Sweid observes.

But not all is humorous. Not only has Sweid lost two marriages, but he has also lost two of his closest friends from home. His longest-lasting friend, Daniel, who is Jewish, with whom he has been very close since they were schoolboys at the Jewish school his parents sent him to, originates from Kibbutz Be’eri – one of the Kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7. Many friends are dead, some are hostages in Gaza, and his mother was nearly burnt alive. He insists that Sweid take a stand against ‘the monsters’.

His close Palestinian friend Salma has friends sexually abused by Israeli soldiers, and her brothers were detained. Her neighbourhood has been completely destroyed. She insists that Sweig take a stand against ‘the monsters’. Sweig resists the binary options which his friends and family insist upon. His identity and his personal affiliations are too complex, too nuanced. He inhabits the space in which sides are not taken. He says, ‘We have to become so close to our enemies that they become part of who we are.’ Yet the reality of his complex identity reveals that he does not control the narrative.

He talks about his first trip to Ramallah to attend an Arab Beer Festival, where an activist he meets warns him not to speak in his usual hybrid Hebrew-Arabic as they are in Hamas territory where Hebrew speakers are endangered. It dawns on him that despite his lack of interest in politics and his purposeful lack of knowledge about the occupation of the West Bank, others identify him as friend or enemy.  

He relishes the fact that in Berlin, he is raising his children away from this polarisation of identity. The children are at school with an international selection of friends and are not defined by their mixed identity or the language they speak. It pains him when his ex-wife warns their son to no longer speak Hebrew on the streets of Berlin. Sweid realised that he can no longer protect his son from the way in which the Middle East conflict has intruded into their lives. He tells his son that ‘people will fear you because you are an Arab, and hate you because you are a Jew.’ 

Sweig relates his personal story with humour and sadness. He is a very engaging performer, a man with a sparkle in his eye and a warm and easy smile. He is an excellent mimic – his father, friends, and his divorce lawyer all come to life in his hands.

While the stage is bare but for a microphone on a stand and a simple wooden chair, music and lighting are well utilised to change scenes and moods.

Between the River and the Sea is a play that tackles how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to tear communities and families apart, and that politically polarised spaces do nothing to move towards finding solutions to the conflict. It is refreshing, a relief, politically and theatrically, to sit for an hour watching an engaging, funny, poignant and thoughtful production on this topic.

It is certainly political as theatre should be, but it also teaches us about the need to retain our humanity when inhumane actions are being perpetrated left, right and centre. In a sense, the play feels naïve – it ends with Sweig reading an essay his son wrote at school about a utopian description of the future of the Middle East. Yet, what I felt for a brief and fleeting hour was a sense of hope.

Between the River and the Sea runs at Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court from 17 April – 9 May

Royal Court, 50-51 Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS

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