Review by Simon Jenner, February 26th 2025
Finally someone says “Cat.” “Yes, Cat” says Mariam. “Great.” That’s an improvement as “How many pairs of underwear would you pack?” gets polite murmurs. Mariam’s packing 23 kg in a pillowcase, her son’s exact weight, rehearsing the 5-15 minutes warning she has from the “Knock on the Roof” of the title: the IDF’s polite warning with a dummy bomb that the next one’s real. Those were the days. Rehearse, run, repeat. After Edinburgh and Off-Broadway acclaim, Khawla Ibraheem writes and performs A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court Downstairs, directed and developed by Oliver Butler till March 8th.
Mariam’s somewhere in Gaza with her elderly mother and son Noor on a seventh-floor flat. Her consciousness is suffused then wired to one thing: flight. Joking and interacting with the audience – from before the start she asks the stage manager “Are we ready?” – Ibraheem oscillates between a sliver of stand-up and pulsating terror: relieved by high anxiety. “Are we ready?” is naturally a watchword, usually between two alarms set five minutes apart. Everything in Mariam curls tight about what you’d save. “In Gaza, nothing belongs to you.” Frank J Oliva’s set emphasises this: just one chair against the stage’s white brick backdrop: as if the stage itself is packing up and fleeing. “The readier you are, the better chance of survival you have.” Ibraheem flips between jokes and a staring start.
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Indeed on one run Mariam discovers a skeletal shelled building, unclear if it’s a recent or historic ruin, with the same coffee maker she has. As if she’s visiting her future with Hanna S Kim’s projection design falling gaunt around her, literally an open-air prison, varied by Oona Curly’s lighting, which glows then deadens.
Some details of normal life might initially surprise. The play’s prescient, written in 2014 but developed with Obie-winning Butler in 2021. We’re reminded Butler previously directed another one-woman play from 2017, Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzer prize-nominated What the Constitution Means To Me. This latter work takes the assault on women’s rights several stages further: an intersection of a culture where discrimination exists, itself under siege. Further, A Knock on the Roof only underscores just how inured people – particularly here young mothers like Mariam – have been over decades to low-level terror. It’s a universal experience in war zones, but that’s too easy. It’s also particular since uniquely there’s no way out, not even via the beaches.
Mariam cheerfully confides, lightly inflecting other characters’ voices along the way. How she held out for “Noor” over “Adam” as a name, from absent husband Omar; who’s studying for his MA abroad when Mariam herself had been much earlier going for hers. Till she couldn’t leave.
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Feeling trapped, she admits, starts before this crisis. Omar calls thrice daily and obsessively when Mariam chooses not to answer. She bitterly resents and bitterly loves him, but Omar‘s calls become part of a ritual he doesn’t even know Mariam’s living through. She and Omar met in Statistics which unleashes a torrent of jokes. And there’s a cartoon moment.
“Sieged land besieges you.” Early on Mariam relates running to the beach with its vivid array of umbrellas; appalled by people’s unheeding delight in the sewage-polluted sea, the stench no-one notices any more. She understandably dwells on showers, the intermittent availability of water and electricity; charging phones, then leaving phones behind on a practice run.
To underscore this Ibraheem sashays, leaps, sometimes seems thrown into the air by unseen forces, catching at a chair. Sometimes she brandishes it. An emblem of her recently-dead father? Mariam continually cope-jokes at her obsession, edged with terror. Can she be caught short of running if she’s on the toilet? Ibraheem lets Mariam count the ways of being caught out, unready for the crump. Rami Nakhleh’s music and sound design here is etched in: there’s a refusal to overplay, synched with Ibraheem’s moves so Mariam’s story punches through even at throbbing moments of crisis.
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Maria’s rage isn’t simply directed against oppressors. The armed man she encounters tells her to be good and wear a head-covering. Mariam’s Christian and a minority in her own country. More widely, Mariam’s all too aware that you have to be dead to bear a name. You’re anonymised before that and a name on a roll-call after: or martyr – a word Mariam pointedly doesn’t use.
Ultimately being so coiled brings a whirligig, and a believable climax is sprung too. What and who can you choose is something more people are forced to decide as the century rolls. But Mariam’s plight is specific, ongoing, now far worse and essential viewing: either to see where millions are headed; or trying not to be among those who won’t watch.
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Costume Design Jeffrey Wallach, Production Stage Manager Steve McGinn, Associate Set Design Michael Ruiz del Vizo, Associate Sound design Bryn Scharenberg, Associate Projection design Ann Slote.
Stage Manager Ben Delfont, DSM Georgia Dacey, SFX Support Drew McCollum, Production Management Ian Taylor.
Royal Court thanks Y. A. C. K. F. O for support.
Khawla Ibraheem. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
