La Colline – théâtre national: House – Barbican, London

Writer and Director: Amos Gitaï

Arts and culture often tend to be rather sentimental about the concept of home and deeply personal connections that individuals have to places of love, safety and escape from the outside world, but La Colline – théâtre national takes a starker approach with its show House, playing at the Barbican for just two performances. Based on the three documentaries by Amos Gitaï examining a single property in West Jerusalem in 1980, 1998 and 2005, Gitaï writes and directs this engaging piece of verbatim theatre that makes home a place of conflict and collaboration, where families and workers with multi-heritage experiences interact and, crucially, where everyone’s perspective is given equivalent validity.

It would have been very easy for Gitaï to divide his 2-hour and 20-minute performance into three chapters, each one built on one era of the documentary to give the audience a sense of the house and its inhabitants evolving through time. But this collaboration between the filmmaker and La Colline – théâtre national is no mere history lesson and instead produces something far more interesting and involving, an epic sweep of perspectives and deeply held beliefs that makes the house the centre of a complex network of people from its immigrant owners with their own family backstories to neighbours, archaeologists, architects and even two builders chiselling stone and laying bricks throughout who tell us much about the changing experience of the area.

Through these characters who step forward multiple times to speak directly to the audience, House explores the Israel-Palestine conflict in more detail, asking what it means to live in a continual war zone where everyone has a connection to the land. Gitaï looks at the waves of migration that brought families to Jerusalem from the end of the First World War onwards, where multiple nationalities from several continents and multiple religions live together. But it is the density of those relationships that House is particularly good at conveying, exploring the displacement of families whose properties were reallocated and the resentment that has created, the long shadow of the Holocaust and the pain of survivors as well as those like Claire who moved to the city from Turkey via Sweden in solidarity and stayed for a quarter of a century.

House also gives a sense of the gentrification and rapid urbanisation that has changed the face of the city as characters wistfully remember fruit trees and a more agrarian society in a street now crowded with buildings. And through this collective and conflicting narrative – which takes on a momentum of its own – Gitaï blends the development of the physical building and area with many human stories, social, political and cultural experiences that emerge just from this one house.

On a scaffolded set designed by Laurent Truchot and Cécile Kretschmar, which incorporates scenes from the documentary and centres the builders at work, there is a representational form to the show that gains momentum as it unfolds, and, played without an interval, arrives at its conclusion with few lapses in energy.

House is earnest in its approach, and its lack of sentimentality ensures the personal stories don’t move you, but form part of a communal response, making this an intellectual rather than an emotional watch, but one that demonstrates why the concept of home and who it belongs is far more complicated than it might seem.

Runs until28 September 2024