REVIEW: Return To Palestine

©️ Return To Palestine, The Freedom Theatre

What does it mean to represent a place that is simultaneously remembered, imagined and restricted?

In Return to Palestine, the answer is not found through realism. There is almost no attempt to reproduce Palestine on stage through scenery or visual detail. Instead, the production asks the audience to construct Palestine through the bodies of the performers: gesture, music, fragments of dialogue, repetition and imagination. A stage of roughly four square metres becomes a road, a home, a checkpoint, a family gathering and a place of danger. The physical limitation of the space becomes one of the production’s central theatrical devices.

The Freedom Theatre describes the stage as being “as small as Palestine”. The phrase initially sounds paradoxical, but the contradiction is precisely what the production exploits. The smaller the physical space becomes, the more work is given to the actors and the audience. Nothing can simply be placed on stage and accepted as a location. Everything has to be created. A shift in formation can become a landscape; a movement can become a border; an object can acquire a meaning far beyond its material function. The audience is therefore not simply shown Palestine but made to participate in its theatrical construction. This relationship between restriction and imagination runs throughout the production.

Jad, a Palestinian born in America, returns to Palestine after reading a book and deciding that he wants to experience the place for himself. His journey provides the production with a narrative framework, but Return to Palestine is less interested in conventional narrative progression than in accumulation. Experiences, stories and theatrical forms build on one another. Comedy is interrupted by gunshots, and moments of warmth can suddenly give way to violence. The characters are never presented only through suffering; they still laugh, make music, get married and perform. Humour therefore becomes more than comic relief—it becomes part of the production’s representation of survival.

This is where Mohammed El-Kurd’s phrase, “There has always been struggle, there has always been jasmine,” becomes useful to me as a way of thinking about the performance. The jasmine does not represent an escape from struggle. It exists alongside it. In Return to Palestine, laughter does not cancel violence, just as celebrations do not cancel grief. Instead, these forms of expression demonstrate that Palestinian life cannot be reduced to the conditions imposed upon it.

The production’s use of performance itself reinforces this idea. Return to Palestine was devised with graduates of The Freedom Theatre School and developed through story-gathering using Playback Theatre. Stories were gathered from Palestinian communities including Jenin, Fasayel, Dheisheh, Mufaqara and Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, before being transformed through acting and movement.

This devising process is important because it complicates the distinction between “story” and “testimony”. The performance is not structured as a documentary presentation in which information is simply delivered to an audience; instead, lived experiences are translated into theatrical form. The actors therefore do more than play characters, as their bodies become the production’s scenery, geography and archive. Music operates similarly within the dramaturgy, with rhythm establishing a communal atmosphere and sound carrying cultural memory without requiring explicit explanation. Together, movement and sound become almost inseparable, creating a theatrical language that communicates through physicality as much as through speech.

There is also a productive tension between the specificity of the stories and the scale of the political context surrounding them. Roads, borders, poverty, uneven landscapes, bombardment and the buying power of dollars appear alongside questions of American influence, displacement, occupation and political power.

This is perhaps why the title Return to Palestine feels more complicated as the performance develops. What does it mean to “return” to a place when that place is simultaneously geographical, political, familial and imagined? Jad’s journey is not simply a movement from America to Palestine. It becomes a confrontation with the gap between an imagined homeland and the material conditions of reaching it.

The final question, “How do we get to Gaza?”, therefore lands differently from a conventional theatrical ending. It confronts the audience with what has happened and asks what can be done in response. The unresolved question leaves responsibility with the audience, turning the ending into a call for reflection and action.

★★★★

For more information, please visit: https://thefreedomtheatre.org/2026/07/return-to-palestine-in-london/

Credits

Director: Micaela Miranda
Devised and produced by: The Freedom Theatre
Visual Identity and Design: Samar El Hinawi and Holly May Parker

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