A vivid and vital account of the experience of a young Palestinian woman and her family in the recurring dangers and violence in Gaza – both now and in recent years

As the audience sits in the packed auditorium waiting for the house lights to dim, we become aware of the smiling presence of a young woman alone on a sparsely furnished stage against a brick wall. She is Khawla Ibraheem, writer/performer of this one-woman drama, playing the role of wife, mother and daughter Mariam.

Magically, she creates rapport with onlookers without speaking a word. Soon we will become a many-headed interlocutor, sharing her confidences. This moment of calm will become precious, almost as soon as she begins the daily routine in which she is trapped, as surely as she is trapped in Gaza.

Anyone who remembers when the threat of nuclear holocaust began to seem imminent during the Cold War, will be aware of the chilling apparent reality of the so-called ‘four-minute warning’, which meant you would have only four minutes to seek shelter that was bound to be inadequate anyway. For years now, Mariam’s day has been punctuated too often with a five-minute warning from the IDF (Israeli Defence Force), who drop a small bomb to warn locals of something much larger incoming. A ‘knock on the roof’ as Mariam calls it, while all around her Israeli air raid sirens go off.

Sometimes those warnings interrupt a rare hot shower (during one of the intermittent, temporary reconnections of warm water in her Gaza home) and the risk to stay to enjoy that brief normality is too great. She even counts time in wars – "two wars ago" as she puts it at one point.

She has a bulky holdall of clothes and other possessions ready to go, but she agonises over its weight and contents repeatedly. One of her most regular routines involves running rehearsals. How fast can she run and how much can she carry? She's even worked out what would correspond to the weight of her four-year-old son Nur, her greatest burden should she have to make a run for it.

Meanwhile, her main preoccupations and the principal calls on her time, apart from little Nur, who is desperate to go swimming in the sea that is out of bounds because of pollution, are trying to calm her terrified mother, fielding regular calls from her absent husband, who's currently abroad studying for a master’s degree in the safety of England.

I'm not surprised by the plaudits and wrapt reception Ibrahim’s one-woman play has received over its several iterations, including recent runs in Edinburgh and Off Broadway. I think it is vital too for the Jewish community to tune into the daily lives and experiences of ‘ordinary’ Palestinians over the many years of disturbances that reached a horrifying escalation on 7 October 2023.

A Knock on the Roof may be rooted in a deeply political topic, but Ibraheem's storytelling is purely from the persepctive of the innocent bystander. In a beautiful, unbiased manner she manages to solely command the stage in order to share the plight of the Palestinian community.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Alex Brenner

A Knock on the Roof runs until Saturday 8 March. royalcourttheatre.com