Where do you go when the unbearable becomes persistent? This is just one of the initial questions asked by Khalid Abdalla in his profound and beautiful piece of theatre, Nowhere, currently playing at HOME, Manchester. It’s a question that, given the current situation in the Middle East, slaps you in the face and makes you pay attention to what is about to be said.
What follows is a personal history of multi-generational activism; friendship, love and loss; personal and political protest; family legacy and our personal history.
It is Abdalla’s own history that inspires this journey. The son and grandson of political prisoners, it is his involvement in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the subsequent counter-revolution that shapes his journey. It is the stories of his forefathers and of his friends, set within a context of colonialism and decolonisation, protest and uprising, shattering world events, that connects the personal with the political and questions where we are and ‘how we find agency amidst the mazes of history’.
Abdalla is a skilled performer, engaging and open, easy to connect with. From the very start he welcomes the audience into his world, and we feel safe in his hands. He is conversational and passionate, highly intelligent and deeply loving as his stories and experiences unfold. The initially stark and simple set; desk, camera, projection screen, opens up a world view, some of which we have never seen before, using film footage, photo montages, live drawings. Softening muslin curtains sweep in as cyclorama and a small screen offers subtitles to scenes in Arabic.
Ti Green’s design and Omar Elerian’s direction are exceptional in their ability to connect high tech and low tech seamlessly, involving the audience intimately by asking them to create their own simple images yet also bombarding them with images and film footage that challenges a world which we have not known, a past one that we have experienced and the world we live through in the present.
For me, the most moving and important thread in Abdalla’s history is his relationship with his friend Aalam. A beautiful, joyful, vibrant and much loved man struck down with pancreatic cancer and for me, symbolic of how quickly it can all go wrong. How that which is loved and celebrated can be destroyed and lost so quickly.
It is hard to describe Nowhere as a play, it is so much more than that. It is theatrical, there is drama in it but there is something new and exciting about both what is presented and how it is communicated, and it feels different, important and vital because of that.
Reviewer: Lou Kershaw
Reviewed: 23rd October 2024
North West End UK Rating: