The Horse of Jenin: Palestinian solo play tells the story of childhood, loss and resistance under occupation

Jenin, a Palestinian city home to the most delicious sweets and to traffic lights that are not allowed to serve their intended purpose.

It is also a city where, for 20 years, a towering horse sculpture, crafted from war debris by a visiting German artist and local residents during the Second Intifada, stood at the entrance of the city's refugee camp.

In October 2023, Israeli forces took the horse away; to this day, the sculpture's fate is still unknown.

The sculpture was intrinsic to the life of Jenin's Alaa Shehadeh, and its demise inspired him to write.

"From the morning after the army took the horse, I started writing about it. I started with three minutes, then seven minutes, and I started performing these little pieces, until I decided that I was going to do a full piece about the horse," Alaa tells The New Arab.

The result is his play, The Horse of Jenin, which weaves together stand-up comedy, mime, and storytelling to tell of life, loss, and friendship in the Israeli-occupied city, including during the Second Intifada that spanned much of the 2000s.

'The occupation is in the mind'

First performed in Amsterdam in October 2024, the show has since travelled to the US, Italy and the UK.

Its month-long run at the Bush Theatre in West London sold out quickly; to meet audience demand, it will be shown in the theatre's main space for a week in January.

During its run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, it won a Fringe First award celebrating new writing.

"The award is great — it's an appreciation of the Palestinian story, and a celebration of the right of Palestinians to write and tell their own stories. It's an appreciation and celebration of the Palestinian talents we have, and how much the Palestinian story can connect internationally," Alaa adds. 

In a kind of stand-up prelude to the show, Alaa gently pokes fun at characteristically reserved London audiences — we learn and rehearse laughter, "ha ha ha", as well as a phrase he has become accustomed to hearing: "hmm, interesting".

When he transitions from stand-up comic to Alaa, the storyteller, the audience is so successfully warmed up that we continue to pause and take questions as signs that we ought to interject, even when we are not.

"I'll let you know when we're next breaking the fourth wall," Alaa tells us off the cuff.

Alaa and his childhood best friend, Ahmed, are spoken of in tandem from the day they were born, with a local official remarking on their impressive birth weights.

Tender childhood memories, like playing ball games, are soundtracked by plucked guitar strings and gasps of amazement.

With the aid of a few masks, caps and a kuffiyeh, Alaa can transform into a loving grandfather, a shy, flirty teenager, an admiring Ahmed, or a self-important local official.

In a white visor cap, he embodies an American trauma coach who infuriatingly attempts to soothe the Freedom Theatre troupe and the audience with a mantra: "the occupation is in the mind".

Symbol of resistance 

Time is given to pay homage to the city's everyday heroes like Dr Khalil Suleiman, who was killed during the Second Intifada in an Israeli drone strike on the ambulance he was travelling in while en route to save a wounded child.

The city's main hospital is renamed after him, and a piece of the bombed ambulance he was travelling in is incorporated into the horse sculpture. 

Scepticism and mystery abound when a German artist in a beret and moustache begins collecting wreckage and scraps to construct the statue, but they soon give way to new realms of possibility as the imposing statue is built and installed. The project fuels Alaa's dreams of becoming an artist.

For Alaa and Ahmed, the five metre-tall sculpture becomes a site of both adventure and adolescent misdemeanour. It is where surreptitious puffs on cigarettes are taken; where a first kiss happens; where one can clamber aboard and dream of riding off into skies free of checkpoints.

"The horse is a symbol of freedom and much more," Alaa tells the audience.  "This horse is a symbol of resistance, vitality. It is us."

Alaa pursues acting and becomes part of Jenin's Freedom Theatre, but even the city's theatre is not safe from the threat of trigger-happy occupation forces.

Before starring in a performance of Harold Pinter's The Advocate, Alaa tells us to "be the Jenin audience", to laugh heartily at everything he does.

But our laughter is cut short when the Israeli army raids the theatre mid-performance; in the darkness and confusion that follows, Alaa implores us to turn on the torch lights on our phones to reveal heartbreaking loss.

Soon after, in October 2023, Israeli forces removed the statue from the roundabout; to this day, though we do not definitively know what happened to it, it is easy to imagine what might have occurred.

"Our symbol of freedom is a piece of garbage once more," Alaa says. 

Any sense one might have that the performance is a piece of fiction is dispelled at the end.

The audience is told of its responsibility to remember and react to what we have seen: "The horse is yours now," Alaa tells us. "Please take care of it."

As we leave the theatre hall and head for the building exit, the Jenin Horse Reborn, a replica of sorts of the sculpture, bids us farewell.

The Horse of Jenin runs until December 20, then from January 14-22, at the Bush Theatre, London.

Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London

Follow her on X: @shahlasomar