Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: A Knock On The Roof | Bambiland | Rebels And Patriots

In our latest round-up of Fringe theatre reviews, three powerful and timely shows address head-on the experience of war in the Middle East

A Knock On The Roof ★★★★

Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 25 August

Bambiland ★★★★

Zoo Southside (Venue 82) until 25 August

Rebels And Patriots ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard  (Venue 33)  

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, sang a generation, back in 1969.

The sad truth about war, though, is that it is good for some, including failing authoritarian rulers who want to tighten their grip on power, and the mighty arms industry; and in a year when it has barely been possible to watch a television news bulletin without witnessing hideous images of conflict and destruction from Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond, it’s not surprising that a small but powerful group of shows on this year’s Fringe - including the Grotowski Theatre Lab’s beautiful The Border, at Pleasance EICC, already a Scotsman Fringe First winner - seek to address the experience of war head-on.

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Khawla Ibraheem, for example, is a young playwright and actress from the occupied Golan heights, on Israel’s northern border; and in her own monologue A Knock On The Roof she plays Mariam, a young Palestinian mother living in Gaza with her four-year-old son when the Israeli assault on Gaza begins, following the Hamas attack on south Israel in October 2023. 

Her husband is studying abroad, her mother moves in, to be with her family in time of crisis; and Mariam begins to prepare. She knows that the IDF (the Israeli armed forces) often use a technique known as “the knock on the roof” when bombing residential areas, dropping a small bomb on the roof of a building to warn the residents to get out, and then returning five minutes later to destroy the building completely.

So Mariam start to practice; she weighs her young son, fills a bag with books of the same weight, packs a rucksack with their essential things, and sets off to see how far she can run in five minutes, down seven flights of stairs, and through the ever more devastated streets of Gaza. 

During this strange training, she strikes up a surreal relationship with a bombed out building nearby, that she imagines is a place of safety; in the end, she also involves her elderly mother, who starts training by running round the living room.

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The situation is a little crazy, in other words, as is Mariam herself; without explicit politics, her story offers a wild but absolutely credible mix of mounting panic, absurd comedy, and pure tragedy, as her life slides in weeks from relative normality to war-torn nightmare.

And always, at the centre, is Ibraheem’s stunning, funny and heartbreaking solo performance as Mariam; spinning its way towards a conclusion that stops the heart, but is sadly all too believable, in the hell of Gaza, 2024.

It’s 20 years since Bambiland, by acclaimed Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, was first seen in her home city of Vienna. Yet still, this brief abstract nightmare and lament of a play - shaped by the horrors of 1990s conflict in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere - represents a cry of horror at the hell of war that might have been written yesterday; and Peter Lorenz’s production at Zoo Southside, featuring a brilliant whirlwind of a solo performance by Bosnian-born actress Jelena Basic, offers a brief hour of language and imagery that sears itself on the mind.

Structured more like a poem or short theatrical symphony than a conventional narrative, Bambiland is set on a stage backed by a wall of tin cans, and dominated by hanging black bin-bags that - when attacked with Basic’s knife - spew tempests of rubble and tiny toy bodies onto the stage, creating bombed out landscapes which Basic can capture live on camera at ground level, projecting the images on a screen behind her. 

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Among the figures is a toy Bambi, which offers both a memory of childhood, and a globally-recognised image of pure grief and pain, captured in the moment of Bambi’s mother’s violent death. 

The story of Bambiland, though, is of how the warrior figure at the centre of the play - embodied by Basic with terrific power, violence and pathos - has become almost immune to those feelings of pity and loss; driven by rage, vengeance, the need for dominance, and a desperate struggle for survival that wipes out all compassion, and transforms human beings into monsters of cruelty and violence.

That transformation, though, can never be complete; and at the Pleasance Courtyard, Floating Shed theatre - with co-producers  Flabbergast - offer a courageous report from the front line of Israel’s assault on Gaza, seen from the perspective not of the victims living there, but of the soldiers conscripted to destroy the lives of their near neighbours, without hesitation or compunction.  

Written by playwright and actor Nadav Burstein, partly based on Burstein’s own experience as an IDF conscript, and co-devised by a four-strong company of Jewish and Palestinian actors based in London, Rebels And Patriots traces the psychological meltdown of a small group of young Israeli soldiers - three Jewish, one an Israeli Arab - as they seek to avoid, deny, or otherwise escape from the horrible reality of the assault on Gaza and the other occupied territories.

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Many will have little sympathy for their plight, of course; these young men have the option of refusing to serve, although it might cost them a prison sentence, and bitter social exclusion from their community.

Like Bambiland, though, this forceful and timely play comes as a sharp reminder that if war devastates its innocent victims, it also wreaks profound inner damage on those who harden themselves to commit crimes against humanity; and it is powerfully sustained, through a brief and memorable hour, by Nadav Burstein himself, Harvey Schlorah, Tom Dalrymple, and Tarik Badwan as the Israeli Arab Osher, who can finally take the strain no longer, with tragic consequences.  

Joyce McMillan             

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