The Ventriloquist
He’s dressed for the opera: top hat, white tie, a starched shirt-front that has started to bleed. Behind him the city is a field of hollowed-out apartment blocks, fighter jets cut across a gunmetal sky, and a Palestinian flag hangs on, half-buried in the rubble. He doesn’t turn to look. He’s busy with the act.
Two dummies sit on his knee. One stares out with blank, hollow eyes and the stiff, varnished face of a figure that’s only alive while a hand is inside it. The other, slumped and garishly painted, mouths whatever words it’s given. The performer’s lips hardly move. That’s the trick and the joke. The voices that sound as if they come from somewhere else all come from one throat.
The Ventriloquist takes the language of diplomacy, with its envoys, its brokers and its talk of shared positions, and stages it as music-hall. The evening dress gives the gag away: this is entertainment, a show put on for an audience a long way off while the real performance goes on overhead. The paint smeared over his face and shirt does what the dialogue never will. It tells you what the act costs. The jets fly on schedule, the dummies keep talking, and the city behind them has no voice left at all.