Hands Up Plays - At the Marylebone Theatre in London
This post is by playwright and long term Hands up Project volunteer, Peter Oswald
Nick Bilbrough is a man who has good ideas. And one of them is as follows. There are now three books full of ‘remote theatre’ plays written by students mostly in Gaza for Hands Up Project competitions. Why not weave some of these together into a single play that could be performed in theatres? Nick put the idea to me a couple of months ago and I leapt at it. I read through the three books again – TOOTHBRUSH, WELCOME TO EARTH, and POPCORN. They come from a world that’s vanished – Gaza pre-October 7th 2023. They tell about a precarious place under siege, full of vitality. And they tell it from the point of view of teenage children – or younger. Half the population of Gaza is children.
Everybody knows about October 7th and its aftermath. Few people know in detail much about the life in Gaza before that. So just in historical and sociological terms the plays are important. But to me plays are more than that – they are living voices. The voices in these plays are brightly alive – under immense pressure grabbing the chance to speak to the world out of the prison, the death cell, of Gaza.
I have written before - in the introduction to POPCORN – that in my view these are exemplary modern plays, with a clarity and urgency contemporary writers everywhere should look to. Working with these plays is like handling some strange substance that’s fallen to earth in a meteorite. What exactly is it? Will it explode? If you breathe it, what will happen to you? Can the human heart cope with it? I am very happy to say the experiment is underway, since there will be a public reading at the Marylebone theatre by professional actors on Monday 13th May at 7.30pm, of this new play made out of plays, called WELCOME TO GAZA.
Two things to add – one is that in making this collage of plays, I’ve created a frame, the idea that they are being presented at a judging event for a competition. The character in charge of this – ‘The Englishwoman,’ keeps receiving updates from students in Gaza experiencing the present catastrophe. She shares these with the audience. So the plays, all written pre-October 7th, are continually interrupted by post-October 7th events. This reflects the reality all Hands Up people have lived with over the past months. Every day, via phone or zoom, fresh horrors are reported in the voices of young people and teachers who live on a planet called murder, where children lie dead in the streets or decomposing on the hospital floor.
Second thing. Listen to this. When I say all the plays in WELCOME TO GAZA were written pre-October 7th, that’s true. When I say that world is gone forever, that’s true too. But the unfathomable thing is that ‘remote theatre’ has continued to come out of Gaza since October 7th. At least one new play, IT WILL BE OVER SOON, and one new version of an old play, I CAN, have been put together by young people and teachers and beamed out of Gaza under the present conditions of mass murder. Enough said, about the spirit that fills WELCOME TO GAZA.
About the reading on Monday 13th, though, I will add that one of my favourite actors, Harriet Walter, will be reading the part of The Englishwoman. The director is Tanushka Marah.