Review: A KNOCK ON THE ROOF, The Royal Court

“Sieged land besieges you.” Gazan mother Mariam confides in us in A Knock On the Roof. Her strained humanity is splayed front and centre of Khawla Ibraheem’s psychologically anguished one woman show. Penned before the war which followed October 7th, its humanity takes on all the more pulsating prescience.

Mariam habitually practices escaping her apartment block as a safety precaution while waiting for the ‘knock on the roof’; a five-minute warning given by the IDF for civilians to evacuate a building earmarked for bombing. How far can she run with packed bags and a loaded pillowcase in lieu of her young son Noor?

She cloaks her obsessive routine with disarming nonchalance, thoughts absurdly wander from contemplating death and destruction to perfume, prying neighbours, and her unhappy marriage. Her overbearing mother suggests showering in a dress so as to not leave an immodest corpse. It's flecked with goofy sass, but the audience are never sure if they can laugh. Humour brutally jars with Mariam's reality especially when Ibraheem, who writes and performs, slyly throws it back at us: what would the audience pack in their own bags if they had her five minutes?

The warmth of Ibraheem’s stage presence only delays the looming threat. The tendrils of Mariam’s anxiety crawl deep with each dry run, whipping herself further into a jittery frenzy until the actual knock on the roof comes. Rami Nakhleh’s sound design gently clenches its tension-building grip, a murmuring screech imperceptibly growing until it encompasses you in Mariam’s vertebrae-chilling anxiety.

Caught between vast shifting tectonic plates of history and politics, A Knock on the Roof recalibrates the war, exhuming what is lost in headlines and Twitter spats: the human beings sheltering inbetween the sides of the conflict. And it really is inbetween sides. One rehearsal is stopped short by a gun wielding “fighter” who chastises her for not covering her head. Mariam declares that “nothing belongs to you” in Gaza – even her death would be politicised and paraded by either side, as a martyr, as a statistic.

A sequence sees her explore a ruined building projections of tangled rubble crawling up the back wall, dwarfing Mariam as if she is a fly caught in a spider’s web. It’s an apt image to parallel the play’s politics. But despite the darkness Ibraheem conjures a powerful tinge of light. Her maternal love glimmers through everything. A bold testament to humanity’s resilience.

A Knock on the Roof plays at the Royal Court until 8 March

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