A sixteen-foot-high metal horse sculpture stood for ten years at a prominent Jenin roundabout in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine. It was celebrated locally and praised internationally.
In September 2023, an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bulldozer scooped up the statue and carried it off to be destroyed. Like many colonial invaders, it wasn’t enough for Israel to continuously remove or kill the indigenous people; they had to also erase their culture.
The timidity of many British theatre managements in even allowing the mention of Palestine in theatre 2024 led to them becoming complicit in that cultural erasure. However, there are signs that things might be changing, with many shows from Palestine being performed in London in May and June, encouraged by the Shubbak Festival and PalArts.
Culture is a source of identity, of hope, of comfort. Alaa Shehada from Jenin conveys this very effectively in his amusing and uplifting touring show The Horse of Jenin, which will be spending a month at the Bush Theatre in November.
Alaa describes being inspired by Jenin’s Freedom Theatre, which this month brings to Camden the play Return to Palestine, centred on the character Jad, a Palestinian born in America, making his first visit to family in Jenin. The show is derived from a tour of Palestinian villages in which the company would turn village stories into a dramatic production they played back to the village and the subsequent village on their journey.
The IDF regularly raid the theatre and on 13 December 2023, they broke in, "destroyed its offices” and placed its producer and general manager, Mustafa Sheta, in administrative detention (which requires no trial) for 16 months.
As a result of Israel expelling Palestinians from Jenin, the company are unable to reach the Freedom Theatre itself, but they can be seen in May at Theatro Technis.
Other shows with a Palestine connection at the same venue are Manjal, a dance performance mixed with poetry, and the comedy Peace de Resistance, which calls for mass civil disobedience and the equitable distribution of hand puppets.
The independently funded Palestinian Khashabi Theatre, based in a district of Haifa where Palestinian homes were confiscated by Israel, brings to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Centre the dance performance piece Milk after its recent stint at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. It depicts a group of grieving mothers in the wake of a disaster rising from the rubble carrying mannequins representing those they have lost.
London will this month at Theatro Technis see the première of Ahmed Masoud’s English language satirical play Application 39 (for the Gaza 2048 Summer Olympics) based on his 2018 short story exploring what happens when the International Olympic Committee decides the 2048 Olympics will take place in Gaza. It’s no surprise to find that Israel is not keen on the idea, and along with parts of Palestine, they have some control, they set out to disrupt the decision. The show is amusing and sometimes disturbing, but it concludes in a way that might surprise some people.
In 2023, Ahmed was trying with his brother Khalid and his friend the poet Refaat Alareer to turn a building in North Gaza into a theatre. He speaks about that being where the play might have been first performed. The bombing of Gaza stopped that in more ways than one. Rafeet, who wrote the poem If I Should Die, was killed by Israel in December 2023 and Ahmed’s brother was killed in January 2024.
Ahmed, who is based in London, admits that the continuing cruelty inflicted on Gaza makes it very difficult for him to write, but he still regards theatre as important in these circumstances. He says, “it’s not going to stop genocide for sure... but what it does is give us back our humanity, putting people on stage with details that are often missed because genocide is not just about people being killed but also about not being able to see your family or find food or water. Theatre gives us back the humanity we are being stripped of. It creates a record, a footprint of what is happening now.”