2014 Edinburgh Fringe

A play about the Arab Israeli conflict produced by a Canadian theatrical troupe, what can they know. Canada is one of the snowiest, sparsley populated nations in the world. What could they know about conflict, surely by the time you get to the person you had a falling out with you forgot what you were angry about. Turns out they know quite a bit. My friend the Rabbi is a strangely subversive 2 handed play. The 2 leads play 2 friends one a Jew the other Muslim, both let down by fathers alienated from their own faiths. Both trying to return to their faiths. Both characters also play their opposite numbers fathers, a clever almost Freudian touch.
How is it subversive? They're both friends, ordinary guys, neither is a fanatic, or a hero or either. They just live their lives heading into their religions along their own paths. You need patience at least for the first 10 minutes as this introduces them as callow youths making awful, rude jokes about girls.
But bit by bit we hear their story the jokes vanish. The play uses a boldly broken narrative, we're never quite sure the order events happen over the years. Bernie the Rabbi has a clear path, training as first a liberal Rabbi, then eye opening trips to New York and later Israel making him a Bal Teshuva.
Arbi his half Muslim counterpart has a trip to Mecca, then Iran and the Middle East. A journey shrouded in mystery and lost in the fractured narrative in the story, all we know is something awful happened, something that can't be discussed until the final scene.
The subversion lies in the ordinariness of the story. Certain and righteously furious Bernie, lost, sad Arbie both pushed into losing the one thing they really valued...their friendship over conflicts we see they don't really understand. Their discussions about faith as innocent as the earlier discussions about girls. When the final scene takes us straight back to the more innocent beginning, it's genuinely affecting.