“I’M NOT going to let you get shot and see him before me,” says grieving Palestinian mother Nahla in Dalia Taha’s moving and beautifully observed new play Fireworks. “No-one in this family gets to die before me.”

The “him” is her dead son Ali, killed by a rocket in occupied Gaza. It’s one of the most arresting lines in a play full of sharp, powerful writing that speaks to the grief and suffering behind the headlines from Gaza.

Nahla hangs Ali’s martyr poster and photograph on the wall of their drab apartment. The frame has been smashed by sister Lubna, played by Shakira Riddell-Morales in a performance that tugs at the heart strings. Later, she confesses that she did it because she thinks her mother doesn’t love her as much as her dead brother.

Fireworks — the first full production by a new Palestinian playwright to be developed through the Royal Court’s international programme — is set entirely inside an apartment during one of Israel’s many brutal assaults on Gaza.
No-one can go outside for fear of being shot and the two families who live there are barely coping with their enforced confinement.

Neighbour Ahmad, given a memorably true-to-life performance by Nabil Elouahabi, escapes to the roof, where he and his son Khalil go to feed their pigeons and see which buildings are no longer standing.

Nahla, played with a frenzied yet upbeat grief by the wonderful Sirine Saba, wants to be with her dead son. Neighbour Samar (Shereen Martin) has seen the boy in a dream and Nahla demands to know what he said to her, then tells her to go home and dream some more.

It is through the burgeoning friendship between Lubna and Khalil, Samar’s son, that we experience how war infects the life and imaginative world of childhood.

Their games are like the games most kids play, with superheroes and make-believe worlds but with the added element of army interrogations, amputations and venturing outside to see who will get shot first.

The adults deal with the impossible conditions through bitter black humour — Nahla threatens to throw herself from the first floor window but her unemployed electrician husband Khalid — finely played by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri — warns her she’ll end up paralysed and unable to go to the toilet.

Tahar’s script avoids any mention of the Israelis, who are referred to simply as “they” — the ones who live “over there,” still enjoying a normal life that is but a memory in Gaza where the bombs rain down and children are turned into martyrs.
The details of everyday existence — getting ready for Eid, planning a trip to the beach — gives some understanding of what siege and war feels like. We are confined with the characters in their world of smashed dreams and desperate attempts to maintain normality and hope amid the ruins.

Resistance may be futile but Ahmad still wants to phone an Israeli restaurant and threaten them with a bomb, just to scare them so they know what it’s like and Khalid has a gun — is it just to scare people, or will he use it on himself? A scene on the roof between Ahmad and Khalid, when the latter forgets the name of his dead son, is heart-breaking.

Direction by Richard Twyman is sparse and claustrophobic, enabling the actors to make the most of the fine script. The soundtrack by George Dennis is of an ever-present drone of aircraft, distant gunfire and explosions, while equally effective is the flaring and fading lighting of power outages that reveal unsettling flashes of a shattered domestic life under siege.

Fireworks doesn’t necessarily deliver what the title suggests — instead, in slow-burn fashion, it unerringly reveals a world of boredom, fear, childhood denied and the grief only a mother can know.

Fireworks
Royal Court Theatre, London SW1
5/5