The Gaza Monologues, Flute Theatre
Via the TV screen in the corner of the River Room the writers are listening to their stories from tents and makeshift homes in the ruins of their land.
Evening. August 26th, 2025, Riverside Studios.
Eight actors are on stage reading the Gaza Monologues in the small River Room at Riverside Studios which overlooks Hammersmith Bridge. One hundred people have packed in to listen. My niece who is half Lebanese has made Palestinian food. Our Lighting Designer Craig West has created a perfect focussed warmth for the actors to live in on stage. Our musician Mercedes Maresca is tuned in to the suffering and courage of the words and is accompanying them with her chimes and singing bowls. On the walls are panels created by “Stitch Their Names Together.” Hand stitched onto each panel are the names of the Gazan dead since October 2023, and on each panel, there are over one hundred names and there are hundreds of panels. For our event this evening, they have lent us twenty panels, which we have hung around the space. In the corner of the room where I am sitting is a TV screen, away from the created beauty of the stage but essential for our performance. We are using the TV to connect via a Zoom link to the Palestinian writers of the monologues who live in Gaza. Via the TV screen in the corner of the River Room the writers are listening to their stories from their tents and makeshift homes in the ruins of their land.
I have lived with their names for weeks now, as I curated a structure for this performance, connecting the original monologues of 2010, written when the writers were just 15 years old, to their most recent words of 2024, with the Flute Theatre actors first reading the younger speech followed immediately by the older, allowing us all to bear witness to their journeys from boyhood to fatherhood, from being a daughter to being a mother. Journeys that have been lived under oppression and grief, survived through unimaginable bravery. One of the actors begins to cry as she reads her older story, of a family destroyed. She’s fighting back her tears, but they fall all the same. She keeps reading, her whole soul dedicated to the purpose. She kneels unsteadily to the floor to carry on. The room is a hush; everyone completely focussed on communicating to the actor with our silent concentration that we are with her and that we are crying too. She gets through the monologue. I am filled with love for her in these moments.
On the screen a message pops up. Only I see it, because everyone is focussed on the stage. It’s from Tamer Nijim, one of the writers of these monologues of Gaza, her writes to us:
“I don’t know what and how to thank you, thank you for your feelings and emotions, thanks you for your kind hearts, thank you for your concern for us, thank you for everything you did for us.”
The readings continue.
“Millions of stars light our skies but aren’t able to give light to a bombed family under the rubble waiting for its fate.” Amjad Abu Yasin 2024
“I am Mahmud, one of the residents of the besieged Gaza. I live with my child in a tent after the war destroyed our home and our dream. I write these words from the heart of suffering and pain, while the sounds of bombardment and destruction surround us. I see in my child’s eyes questions I have no answer for, a fear that knows no sense of security, and hope struggling to survive.”
Mahmud Najem 2024
And some have a gallows humour; the young girl who doesn’t want to be stuck on the loo when the bombs fall, another whose grandmother needs to find her false teeth not wanting people to know she wears them if she dies “as if they don’t already”. Another whose father lights a cigarette although the house is full of smoke. I’m remember that Anthony Bourdain said, “Everything in the world is made in China, except for courage, that is made in Palestine.”
This evening means the world to me, personally. At Flute Theatre we create interactive productions of Shakespeare specifically for small numbers of autistic people who participate, often with transformative effects for their lives. We also create main-stage adaptations of Shakespeare, adapted and directed by me and performed by the company in European festivals and in London. Over the last three years, we have made a Pericles, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Hamlet and a Tempest. But this year I haven’t had the heart to make a production of Shakespeare, although his plays have resonance for all time and see into the all-pervading hearts of darkness that force man’s inhumanity ever onward, this year I only wanted to bear witness to Israel’s Genocide on the people of Gaza. As directly as I could.
Through staging the Gaza Monologues, we have joined the hundreds of theatre companies around the world to stage one of the most important pieces of verbatim theatre existing today. These monologues bring us directly in contact with the people of Gaza and their lived experience, so that it is impossible to see numbers without remembering a person. Reading the monologues out loud and attending as an audience keeps us human and actively emotional, at a time when many talk of feeling numb and helpless. If live theatre can do anything, it can do this.
At the end of our performance, we told the audience that the writers had been able to listen via the zoom link on the TV. One by one the zoom boxes flickered on, revealing the Gazan Writers, some in tents lit by torches, one or two in safety in Egypt, others a trembling voice in the besieged Gaza City.
Our audience now focussed their eyes, hearts and souls on the TV screen to listen to the people whose lives they had just borne witness to. Yasmin, a young pregnant mother in Gaza City asked us for help, saying “this may be the last time we see each other”, too scared to go to hospital and fearful for the upcoming birth which was to be complicated. She pleads with us to help her leave. We pledge to keep in touch. Somehow, we say Goodbye, we say we love them, and we say no-one is forgotten. Pressing the “Exit” key on the zoom link is brutal. In Hammersmith we take our time. We eat, cry, drink mint tea and talk. Friendships are formed and reforged, slowly coats are found and Goodnights are shared.
In the days and weeks after our performance, Gaza City was bombed daily. Yasmin is now in hospital with ‘pregnancy poison’. I send her love from us all. I will mount this show again, joining the voices of theatre companies around the world who continue to stage these stories so that no-one forgets.
Watch the performance on the link below:
The Gaza Monologues, Flute Theatre. Riverside Studios. August 26th 2025