Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: A Knock on the Roof

A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem. Image by Wael Abu Jabal

****

Act normal. So Mariam says repeatedly. Living in Gaza at the outbreak of yet another war, Mariam is preparing for the knock on the roof. A warning bomb Israeli’s drop on the roof of buildings giving inhabitants five to fifteen minutes warning that missiles are coming. Living on the seventh floor of a building with an unfit mother, a son who sleeps heavily and no elevator Mariam undertakes training to improve how fast they can escape. She’s a little forgetful to say the least, and her husband calling from his studies abroad only interrupts. Yet the injustices of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not the story Khawla Ibraheem sets out to tell in her daring, one woman show A Knock On The Roof, even as they provide context of Kafkaesque proportions. Its primary tale concerns a wife and mother for whom the horrors of war have become normalised, yet for whom normal, as a woman, is an unbearable act. A Knock On The Roof a subversive tale told with devastating honesty. Crushed to within an inch of its life beneath a rubble of endless repetition.

Normal makes for a curious state of affairs in Gaza. Mariam funny, charming and engaging when talking of her son, her marriage, the details of her day to day life speaks of rationing electricity and water, or her son’s day at a sewage strewn beach, as if popping out to the shops. Devastating as she shelters in a demolished building and speaks of her son, her marriage, the details of her day to day life. Acknowledging the abnormality of an enforced normal. Mariam’s visceral honesty occupying too little time amidst a series of five minute relays from her apartment at night, carrying a pillow filled with her favourite things to conjure carrying her sleeping son. What follows being mostly rinse and repeat showing Beckett levels of humour and absurdity. Forgetting to set her alarm, to wear her prayer robe when she showers providing excuses to do it all over again. By the time the inevitable knock arrives you’ve been through the procedure so many time times the terror is normalised for the audience. A victory, true, but a pyrrhic one. Yet Ibraheem has a Freudian twist in the tale of such devastating power you almost forgive her.

If Oliver Butler’s direction allows Ibraheem freedom to express, some judicious slowing of pace would help moments of poor diction and the bullet-like barrage of droning text especially near the end. Throughout, Muaz Aljubeh’s lights work overtime to create mood, with Hana S Kim’s shadowed projections proving hugely affecting. But calling Frank J Oliva’s single chair a set is a little rich. By the end you might feel angry. Not just at the current, real time conflict which informs everything ontsage, but at Ibraheem for not doing sufficient justice to Mariam. For Mariam has the potential to be one of the most significant characters of recent times. This woman who is a Palestinian and not just a Palestinian woman. A woman who, in the words of Hengameh Hoveyda;

They have exiled me in myself.

Instead, we get Run Lola Run. Even so, A Knock on the Roof will knock you off your feet. A testament to its strength lying in the fact that even if the horrors of the current conflict were not informing it, A Knock on the Roof would still make for a devastating piece of theatre.

A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem, presented by Piece By Piece Productions (USA), runs at Smock Alley Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2024 until October 12.

For more information visit Dublin Theatre Festival 2024 or Smock Alley Theatre