A Knock on the Roof @ Traverse Theatre

A Knock on the Roof is one of the most important pieces of work to emerge from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in years

★★★★★
Review by Ellen Davis-Walker | 20 Aug 2024
  • A Knock on the Roof

The average person can run 700m in 5 minutes, Khawala Ibraheem informs us, as her character, Mariam, sprints from her apartment building clutching a pillowcase stuffed with possessions. In 2015, the Israeli military started a practice known as ‘a knock on the roof’. Fighter jets would drop warning bombs on residential buildings in Gaza, creating a five to fifteen minute evacuation window for inhabitants to flee.

What do you bring when you have five minutes to pack up your life, Mariam asks. This question frames our engagement with the play, humming in the background like the sound of drones, with percussion woven into Rami Nakhleh’s soundscape. It becomes the heartbeat to a show that started as a single monologue in 2015, one that Ibraheem wishes did not have to exist today.

Throughout this intensely brilliant 1-hour performance directed by Oliver Butler, we watch as Mariam prepares for a knock on the roof when bombs fall on the eve of Ramadan. We see her set alarms, practice sprints, watch her limber and leap into action with wonderful physicality. Ibraheem‘s comic delivery also offers moments of levity as Mariam grapples with her mother, her skincare products, and her capricious, cartoon-loving child, Noor (who can’t stop snacking between Suhoor and Iftar).

It is important to act normal in times of war, Mariam reminds us, even when the impossibility of the task is evident. Living on besieged land engenders a different normality: one where freedom is never truly yours. The decision to leave occupied territories is contingent on permits: the length of showers on available electricity; the world’s reaction to your death on how reassuringly you smile in photos. Choices, as the play demonstrates, are only ever an illusion.

A Knock on the Roof will also leave you with questions. For example, do you think you’d sing to your child if bombs fell from the sky, like parents in Khan Yunis or Rafah will do tonight? Would you, like Mariam, be brave enough to tell your baby that artillery explosions outside were just fireworks? How fast could you run, really, with 8 kilos of possessions on your back, weighed down by the knowledge that your old life had just vanished into dust?

Truthfully, Ibraheem is right. This play should not have to exist. It should not take an (indomitable) actor reading a letter from her neighbours in Majdal Shams, begging for this bloodshed to end with their murdered children, to elicit empathy. It should not take the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinians, nor the deserved success of a stellar one-woman show, to (finally) generate outrage.

A Knock of the Roof is, without question, one of the best and most important pieces of theatre to emerge from the Fringe in recent years. But it is also a reminder that opposing this genocide is the only true choice available. Failure to do so will mean losing the ability to save ourselves, in the end. No matter how far we run.

A Knock on the Roof, Traverse Theatre (Traverse 2), until 25 Aug, various times, £5-22.75