Under the brutal might of Israeli bombardment, how far can a mother in Gaza run to keep herself and her son safe?
It is a question the Syrian Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem has been asking for more than a decade, since the first realisation of her play A Knock on the Roof was born.
This high-intensity, 75-minute monologue is written and performed by Khawla, who is based in the occupied Golan Heights and is a fixture of Palestinian theatre in the occupied West Bank.
After runs at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer and at the off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop earlier this year, it is now showing at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Mariam is a young mother dealing with the trials of family. She is raising six-year-old Noor, her mother is overbearing, and her husband is abroad studying for his Master’s, his frequent phone calls a thorn in her side.
She has other, more trivial preoccupations: she is a coffee fiend, she has an expensive and carefully crafted skincare routine, and books are piling up on her To Be Read list.
Some of her problems are more specific to life in Gaza, like trying to run her home on an unsteady supply of water and electricity.
Israel’s ‘roof-knocking’
The play begins on the eve of an Israeli bombing campaign on Gaza – we don’t know which one exactly, but we know Noor has already lived through two wars in his short life, and that Gaza has long been under siege.
For weeks, Mariam practices hers and her son’s escape from the residential tower block they call home.
“How far can you run in five minutes?” she asks us.
Five minutes is roughly how long a warning Israel gives Palestinian civilians to escape from buildings that are about to be bombed when it uses a tactic known as ‘roof-knocking‘.
Israel began using roof-knocking in its bombings of Gaza in 2008, the drop and thud of a small or non-explosive missile onto a roof meant to warn civilians that it would imminently be bombing the building they are in.
Using a smaller bomb to warn a bigger bombing is on its way is a humane way of letting people escape, Israel and its supporters say.
Civilians in Gaza have been killed by such ‘knocks’; the knocks are not issued all the time – especially in the months after the beginning of the genocidal bombardment of Gaza in October 2023 – and the psychological distress that comes with the fear of a knock, and what inevitably follows, is plain to see in Mariam.
Mariam has thought long and hard about how to get out of her seventh-floor flat as efficiently as possible and runs us through her sound reasoning.
But as the bombing campaign shows no sign of ending, her thoughts grow increasingly frenzied, and her exit plan is thrown into uncertainty by an endless spiral of what-ifs.
Mariam troubleshoots out loud, asking a predictably well-meaning but ultimately useless audience for advice.
When she asks us what she should pack, one audience member replies “passport.”
“That would be great, if I had one,” she retorts.
Relentless and consuming monologue
The torment of an impending Israeli bombing leaves Mariam increasingly scatterbrained, and she begins to botch even the most basic elements of her plan in her practice runs, leaving us unsure if she’ll have her wits about her if or when the time comes for the real thing.
She sits on the toilet reeling off all the things that could go wrong, falls asleep on the floor after exhausting herself with the distraction of cleaning her flat, and wakes up to reproach from her mother.
Mariam’s monologue is relentless and consuming, the gravity of the subject difficult to bear.
Her darting speech fills the theatre with tension and anxiety. Her interactions with the audience are a necessary breather, both for her and for us.
With her dry and quick wit, the kind that could only have been forged out of chronic adversity, she bounces off of the audience members she ensnares into conversation, bringing laughter and some levity.
The stage floor is completely bare for the whole performance, save for a chair, but it does not feel empty.
Khawla describes in lucid detail even the busiest of scenes (a packed-out beach, an elaborate obstacle course in the living room) through her monologue.
There are times when even the lone chair feels like clutter, something for an anxious Mariam to trip over or to trudge through the streets below her building with.
Engaging acting, captivating storytelling
The use of light and sound is sparing, but impactful.
When Mariam is outside doing her trial runs, her shadow or the forms of bombed-out buildings loom large behind her.
Perky, news bulletin-esque original music soundtracks her practice escapes. In her flat, a stream of light that initially feels sourced from a dream later reveals itself to be a pour of dust.
Mariam is a woman very much in her own head, and while her explanation of some aspects of her life in Gaza is plentiful and profuse, she says little about who has been besieging Gaza, whose siege limits the water and electricity supply, and who it is that is doing the bombing.
As her nerves fray, she calls on the inanimate rockets, not the Israeli military firing them, to end the misery of anticipation.
Mariam’s story is enthralling, Khawla’s acting spellbinding, and her writing witty and dynamic.
You are so caught up in Mariam’s personal plight that it is only as you unwind later that you might feel a disconnect between her story and the extensive, systemic horror it is situated in.
Is this disconnect a necessity? And, where cultural institutions and realms are smothering criticism of Israel, could such a heart-wrenching play on the agony of living under Israeli bombing and siege be put on in Edinburgh, London, or New York if it were more explicitly political?
A Knock on the Roof runs at the Royal Court Theatre in London until 8 March
Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. She was previously a staff journalist and news editor at The New Arab
Follow her on X: @shahlasomar
