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Artwork for 'Miriam and Youssef' designed by Adish, Israeli-Palestinian fashion house operating in Tel Aviv and Ramallah; show creator Steve Waters. (Courtesy BBC World Service)
LONDON — One of Britain’s most successful playwrights, Steve Waters, has taken on the thorny topic of Middle East politics with an ambitious 10-part drama about the birth of the State of Israel for the BBC World Service radio network.
“Miriam and Youssef” is about two young and idealistic people — one a Jew from Eastern Europe, the other a Palestinian Arab. It has an unusual narrative arc, with Waters introducing the characters in 1917 rather than in the immediate run-up to the birth of Israel in 1948.
The show launches April 29 on the BBC World Service website, and will be also be available as a podcast immediately.
Waters is a professor of scriptwriting at Britain’s University of East Anglia with a starry back catalogue of plays for stage and radio, frequently based on real events with a fictional twist. He had a 2017 stage hit in “Limehouse,” which traced the rise of Britain’s centrist Social Democratic Party after it was founded in 1981 by a group of dissident Labour politicians. (The play’s closing night packed a shock of its own as three of the surviving founders turned up in the audience, to the slight consternation of the actors.)
Reviewing one of Waters’s most recent plays, the Guardian’s veteran critic, Michael Billington, quoted German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, who asserted that “in a good play, everyone is right.” Waters certainly takes that to heart in “Miriam and Youssef,” where the listener hears not just the Jewish and Arab viewpoints, but also the unenviable story of the British Mandate and its officials, told through the eyes of fictional British civil servant, Harry Lister.
Waters, who lives just outside Cambridge, is cheerful and good-humored with a proclivity for meticulous research — lots of it.
A photo of Tel Aviv in pre-state British Mandate Palestine. (courtesy)
“I love pretending to be a historian, and I dived into the words of people like Tom Segev, Hillel Cohen, Benny Morris and Walid Khalidi. This was just fantastic historiography to draw upon,” Waters tells The Times of Israel.
A mix of fact and fiction
The genesis...