Review: A Knock on the Roof and a Palestinian Mother's Struggle to Survive

This exceptional play, written by and starring Khawla Ibraheem, about a woman disintegrating under the pressure of war in Gaza, had its origins in a 10-minute monologue. That’s not a surprise. But it’s shocking when – at the close – Ibraheem announces the date of its premiere… 2017.

It feels as if it were written yesterday, in direct response to what is happening on the ground. That simple fact reveals just how relentless the conflict between Israel and Palestine has been. The power of A Knock on the Roof springs from the fact that it is a response not to the politics of the fighting but to its impact on the lives and well-being of ordinary people who are simply trying to survive.

A knock on the roof is the description given to small bombs dropped during Israeli air strikes on Gaza that give residents warning that a larger rocket strike is about to destroy their homes. When war starts, Mariam, becomes obsessed with this – determined to get her son Noor and her mother out of the building in time to save their lives.

The show, directed and developed by Oliver Butler, who won an Obie for What the Constitution Means to Me, begins with the house lights up as Mariam draws the audience into her life. Her tone is light, confiding, funny. According to her, she’s a “cool mum”, not one to smother her son with worry. She resists her mother’s pleas to go and live with the rest of the family. She can cope with the danger.

Even her drill for escape is amusing at first; the tile she trips on, the slippers she is trying to run in, her constant invocations to her friend Yasmine who told her to go to the gym. But as she continues to talk, the mood darkens, the lights go down, and she begins to unravel. She starts to shower wearing a prayer dress, in case her body has to be dragged from the rubble.

She rails against her husband, safe, studying for his master’s degree in Europe. “I never wanted any of this,” she says, as she describes her own lost dreams of studying maths. She begins to pack not just essentials but the things she loves best, her face creams, her ornaments. Her training routine becomes more elaborate, more obsessive. She carries a pillowcase filled with books to represent the weight of her son; she pushes her elderly mother into a fitness regime.

Butler’s unswerving sense of building tension and Ibraheem’s warm, naturalistic performance let us see the way that her mind begins to crumble as the constant sense of never being safe eats into the heart of her being. At one point, the lighting throws two silhouettes to show her unravelling. The end is sudden, devastating.

But the impact of the play springs from its quiet empathy with what it is like to live every day under the threat of death, of a rocket falling from the sky and taking away everything you hold dear.

[ed. note: A Knock on the Roof will be performed off-Broadway this winter as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s upcoming season.]