Playwright Hannah Khalil carries on her Palestinian family's story through theatre

For playwright Hannah Khalil, theatre can keep alive the memories of families from the occupied Palestinian territories and those displaced worldwide.

“Theatre can change the way people think. There’s something about having live people in front of you, breathing the same space as you, talking directly to you and you being part of a community, a collective,” she tells The National. "It can make you leave thinking something different, even wanting to take action."

Her play Trouf: Scenes from 75 Years remembers the Palestinian Nakba and will make its UK debut as part of London’s Shubbak Festival on Thursday.

The production, co-directed by Chris White and Ghazi Zaghbani, is composed of fragments of daily life in Palestine, as told to Khalil by family and friends of all ages. “It’s an epic snapshot of life under occupation,” she says.

The evolving theatre project, which began in 2016, was recently expanded to include snapshots from life in Tunisia during the Arab uprisings after Khalil attended a theatre festival there in 2019.

For example, there's a scene in which three women in Gaza are having a picnic and are pestered by Israeli soldiers, which also echoes the female Tunisian protestors of the 2011 demonstrations, who held picnic sit-ins outside parliament.

The play at London's Theatro Technis will be performed by its original cast of Tunisian actors, who will speak in Tunisian Derja vernacular Arabic, with closed caption equipment providing English translations.

For years, Khalil – who was born in London to an Irish mother and Palestinian father – shied away from writing about her father's homeland.

“I've never lived in Palestine. To write a massive play about Palestine and get it on stage in London, where there are so few opportunities for us to see stories that are truthful, felt like a big responsibility,” she says.

“The tricky thing about Palestine is it's as much a land of the imagination as it is a land of maps, because we know what's happening every day.”

Growing up in a household of mixed heritage has shaped her work.

While living in Dubai she spent her summers in Ireland and often felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. “You feel part of places and yet not part of them at the same time,” she says.

But it also allows her to step back from the stories that appear in her plays. “It means that you can look at a place slightly differently and make art or write about it in a way that you couldn't if you were totally embedded,” she says, referencing Salman Rushdie’s book Imaginary Homelands as an example.

“I’m proud of my heritage on both sides. A lot of people ask me if it’s a weird combination but they clearly don’t know their history. Both places were divided by colonialism,” she adds.

Khalil feels a responsibility to carry her family’s story through theatre and hopes the play will elicit the audience to keep remembering and telling stories of Palestine.

“All of us who are next generation, who are carrying historical – and continuing – trauma, there’s this sort of responsibility to tell that story, to carry it and pass it on, so that it isn’t forgotten,” she says. “The play does that to the audience.”

She became aware of the importance of this when her daughter Muna, 11, chose to write a poem about her grandfather’s migration from Palestine to London, via Kuwait, for a competition at the Migration Museum in Lewisham, a borough in south-east London.

This surprised Khalil – who said she’d been too busy to help with the project. “I only use odd words of Arabic at home, I cook maqluba, mussakhan and bamia, I make labneh, she knows I write about Palestine,” she says. “Slowly things started disappearing from the house. I was like where’s my jar of zaatar gone? Where is my tatreez? Where is the keffiyeh?”

It turns out, Muna had gathered the objects, interviewed her grandfather and then her mother. Her resulting poem Green, Black, White and Red won the museum’s competition.

But it is also served as a reminder to Khalil of the many Palestinian voices that go unheard.

“I feel a great deal of responsibility, all these people have given me their stories,” she says, “It’s a privilege to put my version of Palestine out into the world. And I don't forget that.”

Trouf: Scenes from 75 Years runs on Thursday and Friday at Theatro Technis, London. More information is available at www.shubbak.co.uk