'A Knock on the Roof' review — this Gaza-set play is an urgent, empathetic appeal to humanity beyond politics

Read our review of A Knock on the Roof, written by and starring Khawla Ibraheem, now in performances at the Royal Court to 8 March.

Tension is unabating in Khawla Ibraheem’s breathless solo play, in which she herself performs in a production directed by Oliver Butler that transfers to the Royal Court from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Over its 80-minute runtime, we watch Ibraheem’s character Mariam, who lives in war-torn Gaza with her elderly mother and six-year-old son, undertake a series of drill runs from their home, practising their escape route should bombs start falling in their neighbourhood.

It is not a story that develops beyond this scenario, nor one fleshed out with facts or figures, but in honing in on one mother’s exhausting experience of living on constant high alert, it is an urgent, empathetic appeal to humanity beyond politics.

Though the play’s title, A Knock on the Roof, is a reference to a practice sometimes carried out by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) of dropping non-explosive devices on the homes of civilians as a warning before an imminent bombing, the specifics of Israel-Gaza politics are largely unspoken. It’s not clear which period of the ongoing conflict the play is set in either – roof knocking has been an IDF tactic since 2008 – but this acts as a reminder that the brutality witnessed over the past 15 months has been seen before. And with the realities of life in Gaza frequently in the headlines, it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.

Dressed in jeans and possessing a wry humour, Ibraheem’s Mariam is easy to relate to. She’s a vivid storyteller: sharing the stage with just a chair for a prop, she paints a mental image of a relaxed, happy day at the beach before the bombardment starts. When it does, she brings us in on the granular details of what life lived in survival mode involves: meticulous planning and repetitive, obsessive imagining.

She makes practical calls over which treasured possessions she can bring, and mourns the expensive skincare products she may have to leave behind. She worries what might happen if she or her mother are naked in the shower when the bombs fall. She asks the audience whether they know how far they could run in five minutes – not something many of us have had to think about, when our lives don’t depend on it – and adds weights to a pillowcase to practise running with her son in her arms.

Mariam begins this routine with a sense of brave determination, but as the siege continues and her nerves wear thin, we see her earlier adrenaline-fuelled resolve spiral into a foggy state of fraught fatigue, until the sound of bombs on the TV have her running from the building, and amid so many drills, she forgets which weights she should be carrying. It’s a feat of a performance.

Perhaps this story could evolve further, sketching a wider picture of Mariam’s life in Gaza. Eerie but underused video projections from Hana S Kim, conjuring shadow characters on the back wall of the stage, could help with this. Tonally, it could afford to be a little more varied too, adding lulls and spikes to the tension it carries so well. Regardless, this story of motherhood in the toughest, most terrible circumstances is brave, noble commissioning, and persuasively performed by Ibraheem.

A Knock on the Roof is at the Royal Court to 8 March. Book A Knock on the Roof tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: A Knock on the Roof (Photos by XX)