What inspired you to write Plan D?
Before Plan D I’d never written a play about Palestine, it seemed too big, too difficult a topic. But it was always there in the back of my mind as something I MUST write about because my father is from Palestine. Although I have never lived in Palestine myself, I still have family in the West Bank. My father—an incredibly inspiring man who taught himself English at night under the street lamps by a motorway in Kuwait—has told me many wonderful, evocative stories from his childhood, and I’ve wanted to weave them into the narrative of a play since I started writing. What’s more, I’m constantly inspired by all the strong women in my life—both my grandmothers and especially my Irish mother whose own history oddly and closely mirrors my father’s.
All these inspirations came together in March 2008 when I was at a seminar at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), set up by the wonderful Palestinian Society there, called “The Eye of the Spoken Word: Oral History and The 1948 Nakba.” (“Nakba” means catastrophe in Arabic and it’s what Palestinians call the events of 1948, when the State of Israel was created and many Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land.)
This seminar aimed to bring together scholars, filmmakers and oral history specialists to reflect on the narratives of the 1948 Nakba to try and preserve the Palestinian collective memory. In it, a brilliant Israeli academic, Eyal Sivan, talked about his project collecting filmed interviews from Palestinians and Israelis who lived through 1948, Common Archive Palestine 1948. He was concerned that many who’d been there were reaching the end of their lives and that because “history is written by the victors,” these stories would vanish. He played a few interviews and some of the stories from the play are directly borrowed from them. I found the interviews incredibly affecting—especially because the Palestinians were not doing what they usually do when you see them on TV (crying or mourning a death), they were calmly and measuredly telling these awful stories about what happened to them, happy to at last have a forum to do so.
It was these personal stories and experiences, largely untold, which inspired me to write Plan D. I’ve created a fictional family faced with the same impossible question that too many Palestinians were in 1948: should we stay in our home and risk life and limb, or leave our country and seek safety elsewhere?
Most had no choice but to leave, and so convinced themselves the war would pass and that they would return home soon, little imagining that sixty-eight years later (at time of writing) millions of Palestinians would still be displaced.
What you think a reader might want or need to know?
A lot of people have an issue with my attempt to make Plan D universal, in deliberately not naming the country or the characters in the play, but it was a decision I didn’t take lightly. I wanted to try and force the audience to see the story with new eyes and not have a prejudice or bias toward the situation.
I hoped that in watching it and not immediately knowing where it was they’d be surprised to find it was Palestine and be interested to discover more. I also loved the idea that other people might read the play and recognize the experience of these people as something from their own history, and that a director from Bosnia, South America or Africa might want to do the play and cast it as such, bringing fresh resonance. Ultimately, it’s a play about relationships, family responsibility and how the family unit copes under unbearable strain.
The Israeli military operation to expel the Palestinians was called Plan D. This, I thought, was the perfect title for the play, in that anyone who knew the history of the time would understand the reference and anyone who didn’t would (I hoped) think that Plan D was probably the last option for the family in the story (after plans A, B and C had failed).