TAHA at Space Theatre

TAHA is a deeply personal story from beguiling writer-performer Amer Hlehel. He recreates the life of Taha Muhammed Ali, a man who would one day become Palestine’s great poet, but whose early years as an enterprising and optimistic young villager are cut short when his home is bombed and his family are forced to flee Galilee.

On a bench in a circle of light, Hlehel conjures the sounds, smells and tastes of Taha’s village, Saffuriyya, the market places and exhaust fumes of Haifa and the streets of Nazareth. We feel the cosy rooms, filled with the aroma of coffee, where his father presided over his salon. We smell the olive oil, figs and fresh bread at his grandfather’s bakery. He bids us follow him as his family and a hundred other villagers walk through dark woods over the disputed border to the refugee camps of Lebanon.

In a tour de force solo performance that interweaves Taha’s exquisite poetry with his compelling and sometimes heartbreaking life journey, TAHA is so vividly realised you will feel you lived alongside him.