Khalid Abdalla’s audacious avant-garde solo show is not so much a meditation on belonging as its opposite. Somewhere in its multimedia depths of images, audio voiceovers, personal stories, song and dance, we hear Theresa May’s infamous words on citizenship: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
Abdalla brings an intelligent twist to this thesis, asking where you belong when the country in which you were born or raised does not want you or has become too dangerous for you to stay. How does it feel to belong in Nowhere-land?
A 90-minute show, produced by Fuel, directed by Omar Elerian and performed straight through, it quizzically calls itself an anti-biography even as it takes us through Abdalla’s life. A Glaswegian Egyptian hailing from a family of political dissidents, and himself a protestor in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, he has faced flagrant anti-Arab prejudice in the west. We hear how that intensified in the aftermath of the Twin Tower attacks, and also of his typecasting as an actor.
It is a mix of the personal and political, taking in the current Middle East conflict and the dehumanisation of Arabs, and weaving it together with the story of an Egyptian friend with terminal cancer. It takes in the toxic legacy of western colonialism in the Arab world, 9/11, Hamas’s terror on 7 October, and Israel’s “genocide live-streamed into our phones”. The indignities of living under Israeli occupation, the siege of Gaza and the degradation of Palestinian life are recounted.
Images speak even louder than words: there is a line of clothes laid out on a beach, representing the children killed by Israel in Gaza, which chillingly stretches for miles and never reaches an end. Sometimes a life is summarised in photographs which have the same blend of personal and political as the text, from a snapshot of Abdalla as a baby to Ronald Reagan to the protest marches against South African apartheid to Bin Laden to Abu Ghraib and so on.
Nowhere is an unruly creation, sometimes frustratingly undisciplined, but with such rich moments that it feels like more than theatre, and asks something of its audience with its consciousness-raising message for peace at the end, which feels like a radical and urgent action in our world.
• At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 19 October; then Home, Manchester, 22-26 October
