MILK مِلْك

MILK مِلْك. Image by Eid Adawi

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Milk. Or rather, mother’s milk. Lactating in rivulets when not raining down like a deluge from heaven. Gathering as lakes, or gushing streams, nurturing the earth, plants and all who live and die. Like water, or blood, it is a lifestream of strength and sustenance. Gift of Mother Earth, or any life giving mother, who, like her children, suffer most during times of disaster, natural or man made. An experience vividly and viscerally realised in Bashar Murku and Khulood Basel’s stunning visual poem MILK مِلْك. Offering a profound meditation on pain and loss as experienced by women when disaster strikes.

MILK مِلْك, image Christophe Raynaud de Lage Festival d'Avignon

Given Khashabi Theatre are a Palestinian company, the temptation view MILK مِلْك solely as a response to Gaza’s current disaster are unavoidable. Yet if Gaza lends MILK مِلْك a resonant immediacy, the work evolved in 2022 to speak to a wider sense of how humans respond to unimaginable disasters. Politics and blame are not the issues here. As Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel have commented; “three years ago, we thought we had succeeded in MILK مِلْك creating a theatrical poem about what wars leave behind. But over the past three years, as ‘real wars’ have crushed people before our eyes and stolen everything they love, we have come to realise how incapable theatre is of capturing even a single moment of war.” True, perhaps. But MILK مِلْك  makes a decent attempt at it.

MILK مِلْك. Image by Eid Adawi

Performed without words, MILK مِلْك trades in image as text. Murkus unafraid to let images linger and arrest attention beyond an immediate response, inducing a deeper, meditative engagement. Like the opening moments. The stage covered in floor mats, a single chair and a lifeless mannequin with holes in its arms and legs, as well as cavities in its stomach and chest. The image textured by Raymond Haddad’s two note melody; Haddad’s score revelatory throughout. Images becoming tableaux, a recurring device, often evoking a variety of pieta’s with madonna’s cradling their dead children. Seen as five women take to the stage, mechanically rocking the lifeless forms held in their arms till, eventually, they slip to the floor.

MILK مِلْك, imabe by Khulood Basel

As images and sequences follow - attempts to take a family photograph, to engage with lifeless mannequins like children being called to, cooed, kissed - there's a sense of MILK مِلْك as performance art within a theatrical frame, washed in a downpour of Pina Bausch. Physically demanding and repetitive routines, confrontational stares to the audience, the endless upheaval and reforming of the space, the hyperphysical physicality of impossible umbilical chords and lactating breasts grounding the action in visceral experience. Pushed to metaphorical extremes as the stage becomes a lake of breastmilk, or a heavily pregnant earth mother brings plants and fruits and hints at a bittersweet resurrection. Though such images pack a mean punch, it’s a punch often undermined by their repetitive nature. As Eddie Dow endlessly removes floor mats to create a wall of rubble you’re as likely to count them to see how many more he has to remove as feel the physical strain of the sequence. Like being constantly tapped by an annoying child, repetition risks you becoming desensitised and numbed, and checking your watch.

MILK مِلْك Image by Eid Adawi

Even so, a return to transformed images of cooing, kissing and calling children opens onto moments of such pain and beauty they imprint powerfully. Performers Salwa Nakkara, Reem Talhami, Shaden Kanboura, Samaa Wakim, Firielle Al Jubeh, Samera Kadry and Eddie Dow never less than compelling. Technically, too, everything about this production is simply stunning. Muaz Al Jubeh’s lighting design and Majdala Khoury scenography crafting a heavenly journey through unimaginable hell. As MILK مِلْك  opens onto its final image of women lying strewn amidst the rubble, their confrontational stare is still vividly felt, asking; "do you see us? Do you see us now?"

We do.

But now what?

MILK مِلْك by Bashar Murku and Khulood Basel, presented by The Abbey Theatre and Khashabi Theatre, Palestine, runs at The Abbey Theatre until March 1.

For more information visit The Abbey Theatre