When the IDF are going to attack, they drop a warning bomb: five minutes to get out and get away, as far as you can, before the big rockets come.
So says Gazan resident Maryam, in Khawla Ibraheem’s monologue. For such a terrifying concept, Ibraheem – who performs the monologue, too – starts things off breezily. She asks the stage manager if we’re good to start. Chats to us like we’re catching up on the phone, occasionally asks us questions (‘how many pairs of underwear would you pack?’) and gets frustrated when politely reticent audience members don’t answer.
Then she starts practising her escape: setting timers on her phone to mark five minutes, packing bags the same weight as her small son, worrying what she’d do with her mother, thundering down the seven floors of her apartment block. This becomes an obsession, as normal life around her is slowly obliterated and her mind, in a constant state of alertness, winds itself tighter and tighter. By the end Ibraheem’s voice – always loud and clarion-like – becomes high-pitched and breathless like a long scream.
The script was developed with Oliver Butler, who also directs, and in its chattiness there are some beautifully crafted lines: ‘our freedom is anything but ours’ Maryam says, resenting the many who claim stakes in her home. But the great strength of the writing is the way Ibraheem lets the boring things of everyday life mingle with the horror of being in a war zone. As she runs down the seven flights of stairs, Maryam notices the smell of coffee. As she packs her go-bag she laments the fact she can’t stuff her expensive face cream in there, just as she’s found a skin-care regime that works. She gets annoyed at her nagging mum, her absent husband, her sweet-toothed son: her obsessive, petrified brain can’t stop defaulting to banality, like it’s desperate to return her there.
In being something so resolutely small, so focused on one woman and her small family, small apartment, small neighbourhood, amid the unfolding of such a vastly horrific situation, a strange tug starts to emerge between the play’s necessity and its inadequacy. Necessity because, yes, we need stories like this to turn a thing of headlines and distant horrors into something human, relatable. Theatre is good at that. But inadequacy because this can sometimes can’t help being a piece of theatre: a twist at the end comes across like a writer writing a twist.
Ibraheem wrote an initial version of the play more than a decade ago, during the 2014 Gaza War, and it had several iterations before an Edinburgh Fringe last year and a subsequent Off-Broadway run. Each time, the Gaza conflict filled the news in some newly awful way. In the context of that overwhelming thing, the stark simplicity of this piece – just a chair, some slowly darkening lights, and this one woman’s story – is both its great strength and its occasional undoing.
