No sand slips through the net, no stone is left unturned, and no story is left incomplete, as this heart-breaking story sends a sound reminder that Gaza’s children are slipping through our fingers like small grains of sand.
The storytelling is performed in an intimate and precious way by co-creator and performer, Sarah Agha. Agha addresses the audience throughout, developing a stunning connection with us and allowing the waves of Palestine to wash over the audience — the sand both slapping you in the face and getting stuck between your toes. She convincingly becomes a child of Gaza, estranged from her own country, and her family. She clings onto any human connection and survives through starvation, lost aid packages and crushed family members and animals.
What gets her through is a winged spirit projected dramatically onto the screen at the rear of the stage, whom she calls to in her times of difficulty. She holds her dear, like a family member — providing a structurally necessary voice for the verbatim piece. Verbatim provides the groundwork for this story, alongside the sand beneath her toes. Agha delivers such a moving, sensational kind of storytelling which drives the audience into emotional despair and moves you to tears. She is lyrical and inspiring as she takes on the stories of real children fallen to the Gaza conflict powerfully. Agha uses real stories and poems of the children from the conflict; her face becomes illuminated, with high-pitched instrumentals creating gripping interludes.
While these interludes are powerful, they punch a little too hard in places. They manipulate the dialogue a little too much, shifting the narrative a tad too suddenly away from the central storylines. Playwright and director, Elias Matar, would have been better to integrate these moments more fluidly into the piece. The sudden captions on the projector screen — a stunningly textured material suspended delicately — appear a little cliché. There are a few things about this production that people have seen before.
What is not cliché, however, is the well-manipulated sandpit which the protagonist is stationed in. These grains serve as a place of security and a reminder of hardship — sand is launched from the rubble, or the protagonist is left alone, deserted from all civilisations around her. Initially, the sand is beautifully pristine, although as the piece goes on, mountains are sculpted out of the sand pit which represent the state of destruction in Gaza and the perturbed state of the protagonist’s mind. The sand is not a throwaway element of set design, but one well-integrated and ingrained in the dialogue between the central character and herself with the landscape around her. She is not caged by the sand; it is thrown around the space, representing her voyage to affirmation and her freedom as others are left behind.
A Grain of Sand holds a transformative narrative at its core: don’t let go, don’t lose hope and let the children of Gaza tell their story, just as Sarah Agha provides a mouthpiece for so many.
Photo by Amir Hussain Ibrahimi, courtesy of the Traverse Theatre.