How do you make a show about Palestine funny? That’s what several people ask me when I tell them what I’m doing on my Wednesday evening.
It’s a good question, and I’m not exactly sure what to expect as the lights dim and Sami Abu-Wardeh walks on to the stage. The audience feels tense and even slightly apprehensive. In the back of all our minds are surely the horrific headlines that roll out from Gaza day after day.
Yet when electronic music starts playing and Abu-Wardeh starts dancing under technicolour lights, the crowd dissolves into laughter. Abu-Wardeh commands the stage with the physicality of his performance, whether that is through dancing, hand-puppet sequences, or a mere raised eyebrow that is enough to send the audience into roars of laughter.
It is the absurdity of Abu-Wardeh’s clownishness that balances the show, because it is certainly not all cheerful. Abu-Wardeh takes on the role of storyteller to describe the tale of Merguez, a Palestinian in the 1950s who falls in love with an Algerian resistance fighter in his travels across the Mediterranean. This story of 20th century revolution is interspersed with Abu-Wardeh’s talk show style comedy, with personal anecdotes of Abu-Wardeh’s experience being mixed race and part of the Palestinian diaspora scattered throughout.
The climax of the performance comes when Abu-Wardeh asks the audience, and himself, why he is here, at the Edinburgh Fringe, in Britain, a country responsible for his people’s suffering. It is a powerful and searing moment and highlights the cognitive dissonance which underscores the whole show. How can you enjoy a Fringe show when children are starving due to a man-made famine? How can you go about your day after reading the news in the morning? How can you live in a system which upholds and perpetuates the violent oppression of your people?
Cue dance break.
Abu Wardeh’s performance is both thought-provoking and hilarious, toeing the line between devastating and devastatingly funny throughout. It asks what resistance looks like, and whether resistance through art even means anything at all. While 70 minutes may have been slightly too long (the show would have packed the same punch in just an hour), Abu-Wardeh kept the audience enraptured throughout. His standing ovation was well deserved.
Palestine: Peace de Resistance is running until 24 August (not 12, 21) at the Pleasance Dome. Tickets available here.
Image courtesy of Zoë Birbeck, provided to The Student as press material.
