A groundbreaking line-up of Palestinian theatre, comedy and dance from PalArt Collective has landed at Theatro Technis in Camden as part of Shubbak Festival 2025 – the UK’s largest celebration of contemporary Arab culture. Curated by PalArt Collective and hosted at Theatro Technis, this powerful week-long season (26 May – 2 June) brings voices from Gaza, Jenin and the diaspora to the London stage.
Expect satire, resistance, dark humour and daring storytelling, including:
Application 39
Application 39, by Gazan playwright Ahmed Masoud is a black comedy play that imagines Gaza hosting the 2048 Summer Olympics. Two IT Department employees at the municipality of Gaza, submit an application to the International Olympic Committee as a joke. They hack the website and copy the French application and just change the location. They win the bid as the committee decides that it is the best way to bring peace to the region. In 2040 Gaza is divided into smaller states, run by flying talking robots and underground tunnels are the only way to move through super speedy lifts. The State of Gaza City, accepts the challenge of organising the games and starts building more tunnels in order to cater for various Sports. This upsets some of its neighbours, including other Palestinian states.
Return to Palestine
Return to Palestine from Jenin’s Freedom Theatre centres around Jad, a Palestinian born in America, who goes to Palestine for the first time in his life. Wanting to know more about his people and identity, he finds out that reality is very different from what he has seen in the news.
The play is directed by Micaela Miranda and devised together with the ensemble of Graduate actors from The Freedom Theatre School. It was created after extensive story-gathering through playback theatre with the communities engaged in The Freedom Theatre’s annual Freedom Ride.
The play includes stories from Jenin refugee camp and city, Fasayel, Dheisheh refugee camp, Mufaqara and Jabalia Camp in Gaza.
In a sarcastic, comic and tragic style, the actors create the space, characters and even the emotional spaces they live in, with skilled play with their bodies in a very small stage – “as small as Palestine”.
Peace de Resistance
Come and join comedian Sami Abu Wardeh’s open call for mass civil disobedience, equitable distribution of hand puppets and more! Find out once and for all: can resistance actually be funny? May 26-27 & May 31.
Manjal
An experimental Dabke performance with poetry – 30 May
Ahmed Masoud: “The PalArt Festival promises to be one of the biggest gatherings of Palestinian artists in London. Despite the pain and the suffering that our families, friends and loved ones are going through, we will be on stage showcasing our beautiful Palestinian art and culture to say to the world that, we too, deserve to live and create more beautiful art.”
Please visit the Theatro Technis website for more information, show dates and times: www.theatrotechnis.com/
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