A tapestry of plays written and performed by Palestinian schoolchildren is coming to theatre stages across the United Kingdom in August.
Welcome to Gaza weaves 19 mini-plays created by children in Gaza and the West Bank before 7 October 2023, together with “real-time” messages, phone calls and voice notes from the Palestinian territory.
Responsible for this interweaving is director Peter Oswald, an acclaimed British playwright and poet.
The plays feature the breadth of imagination you might expect from young writers anywhere in the world – the comedic, the supernatural, and the folkloric, Peter told The New Arab – but the plays are at core about the unique hardships that Palestinian children have had to endure throughout their lives.
“The majority of these plays come back to the experience of being under siege, blockade and occupation,” he adds.
“They are about the things that they are denied, the things they can’t have. But their response is always positive, and about cultivating hope.
“In Gaza, hope is not a given – it’s something that you have to keep alive by your own willpower and psychological activity. This is what the plays are about.”
Peter Oswald’s work with these young Palestinian playwrights began in 2017, when a friend, Nick Billborough, asked if he could lend some of his writing expertise to the Hands Up Project.
Hands Up, a Devon-based charity that virtually connects children in Palestine with their peers around the world through English-language learning, drama, and storytelling, was founded by Billborough.
Nick features in the play as an English teacher presenting the mini-plays to the audience. To the frustration of the Palestinian writers and cast of the mini-plays, he interrupts the action with updates he has actually received from Gaza in real life since 7 October 2023.
“The plays are woven together, but not in a way that they are dependent on each other. The frame is that they are being presented for the sake of awareness of the present situation, which is the reality,” Peter said of the connection between the mini-plays and the real-time updates.
“Nick keeps interrupting the action of the plays, and the actors start to get a bit upset with him and interrupt him. So that’s what kind of weaves it all together.”
Breaking the blockade and reaching the world
Some of the young Palestinians from Gaza who created the mini-plays will be performing their work. They have come from third countries, having fled Gaza.
Two of the actors, who live in Belgium, were not granted visas before the play’s first performances at the Totnes Fringe Festival in Devon in July.
One visa application was outright rejected, while the other, for a cast member named Mariam, was only granted after the Totnes shows.
While the visa issues left the production scrambling to find substitute actors (two Palestinians who are based in the UK), the malleability of the play allows for the visa hurdles to be woven into the story too.
“Mariam is going to join us in Edinburgh and beyond, and we’re going to give her a kind of cameo role in the play that she herself originated when she was in Gaza,” Peter tells The New Arab.
“We will put something into the performance about the Home Office only just granting her visa, and that’s why she’s only appearing in one of the plays. The play is such a flexible thing that every time something else happens, it just gets woven into the performance, and the English teacher can just tell the audience.”
The play will be performed on 13 August at ‘Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine’, a mini-festival of Palestinian theatre and performance art back at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time in 10 years.
The version of Welcome to Gaza performed at the Fringe will be shortened from 90 minutes to an hour, and made up of 15 plays instead of 19, to fit into the mini-festival’s busy programme.
The play will then be performed at Palestine House in London on the 22 and 23 of August, as well as at the Greenbelt Festival in Kettering. Performances are also being planned for Bournemouth and Manchester, with dates and venues to be confirmed.
Through Hands Up, children in Gaza, subject to an Israeli blockade for the entirety of their lives, were able to work virtually on their plays with their peers in countries including Argentina. Some were even able to travel to Belfast to perform their work at a school there.
“The kids were already writing and performing plays before Hands Up got involved in Gaza, but Hands Up focused on helping them develop the plays,” Peter said.
“One of the plays – probably the most powerful play – was written by one of our actors who lives in the UK. Her father is still in Gaza. She wrote her play when she was nine years old. She’s 15 now, and performing it in the UK. They felt that their work was going to get out of the blockade and reach the world, and indeed it has.”
A stage towards engagement
When Israel began its genocide in Gaza after 7 October, Peter had been working with a group of children creating their own version of William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
“I feel very personally attached to those young people and the beautiful work that they were doing, which was then just utterly destroyed. They were in Beit Hanoun, which just doesn’t exist anymore,” Peter said.
Since Welcome to Gaza was developed, at least two of the children whose plays will feature in the Edinburgh performance have been killed, Nick shared with The New Arab.
Some live in exile, while the fate of some of the other children, who are living through bombing and an engineered famine and who rely on sporadic messages and calls to connect with the outside world, is unknown.
Video of the performances in Totnes has been sent to the children and teachers with whom Hands Up has been able to maintain contact; “it means a lot to them,” Peter said.
The interweaving of plays written years ago with recent, “real-time” updates from Gaza is a reminder to some and a lesson to others to the audience that the oppression of Palestinians began long before October 2023.
“I think the crucial thing is to push back against 100 years of propaganda and dehumanisation of the Palestinians, which is dragging the world into a moral abyss. If people can harden their hearts against these plays, then they can harden their hearts against anything,” Peter said of Welcome to Gaza.
“People have been saying that they feel helpless, that they don’t know what to do – but at least that is a first stage towards engagement, perhaps," he added.
“People often don’t know what to do practically, but they can vote, they can demonstrate… people will slowly mobilise who aren’t in the habit of doing that.”
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