Tonight, Castlemaine audiences are invited to experience The Return, an intimate and deeply human theatre work exploring love, grief, memory and the enduring bonds between parents and children. Melbourne freelance journalist Andra Jackson had the opportunity to chat with author and actor Ala’a Al Qaisi and writes…
The agonising loss for a Palestinian father of two daughters due to an Israeli air strike was the catalyst for a play that looks at what might be the next step beyond such grief. The play titled, The Return, was written by Sydney based Jordanian born Palestinian Ala’a Al Qaisi, an award winning filmmaker. The play has previously been performed in Sydney including in the recent Sydney fringe festival but had it’s Victorian premiere last Tuesday in Brunswick and is touring regional theatres.
It comes to Castlemaine tonight, Tuesday September 22.
Speaking from Sydney by phone, Al Qaisi who wrote, directs and produced the play as well as performing in it, warns it is not a straight documentary but draws on surrealism as a theatrical device to allow the audience to imagine different outcomes.
The play is followed by a Q and A session.
“We don’t want people to just come and watch the play. We open a discussion for their reflections and questions,” she says.
Al Qaisi came across the plight of the father, engineer Marwan Abu Samra on social media in December 2023 when he sent out desperate video messages from a Gaza hospital.
He pleaded to anyone listening to help get his badly injured daughter to Egypt for life-saving medical treatment. His daughter Nagham, had lost a leg and suffer extensive injuries in an Israeli the air strike that killed her sister Rozan.
Nagham was a karate champion and Olympic hopeful, winning the Palestinian national karate championship in 2019 but was largely prevented by Israel from competing overseas. She opened a sports training club for girls in Gaza.
By the time, Israel granted permission for her medical evacuation a month later, it was too late and she died a few days after reaching Egypt. She was 24.
Initially Al Qaisi started telling the father’s story as a documentary, travelling to Egypt to interview him about how he was dealing with the pain and ‘starting life all over again from zero’ after being in his late 60’s. On returning to Australia, she says, “I felt the documentary is not enough. I
felt the need to write.’’
In the play, Abu Samra is depicted sitting in Gaza next to a cloud and asking the cloud to return his daughters.
“He believes that God has issued a decree that all martyrs are returning and he sits there waiting for them.’’
When he keeps asking for them, people think he is a madman, Al Qaisi says. “He goes on a spiritual journey where he loses track of the difference between reality and dreams, and heals his pain.’’
The play poses the question of how can we reconcile ourselves with knowing such pain keeps happening, with “a live streamed genocide on our phones and we just watch for so long,’’ she says.
“The play is my attempt to heal, it is my attempt to create a space for everyone who cares to come together to think and reflect and do something about it.’’
The Return was first performed in Sydney last year with a return run recently and has been hailed by audiences as powerful and deep.
Al Qaisi also plays a role in the play and admits that is challenging: “How do I direct myself from the outside? I try and watch myself on videos and correct myself. ’’
She is supported by a cast that includes members from countries such as Syria and Lebanon with acting backgrounds-Mohammed El Kesm, Rachid Taki, Ahlam Hijazi.
Al Qaisi moved to Australia in 2010 and completed a course at the Sydney Film School. Her first film was called Pink Swings about a children’s playground in the West Bank that was destroyed to make way for Israeli’s apartheid wall.
The play is very close to Al Qaisi’s heart. Its title, The Return also has wider context, one that Al Qaisi carried within her when she moved to Australia.
Her family was originally from Hebron in the Occupied West Bank.
“Due to the establishment of Israel, we were expelled’’. Her mother was five at the time and her Grandparents in their thirties. “I grew up with stories of our Nakba (the catastrophe, of 1948 when thousands of Palestinians became refugees.), the expulsion of Palestinians from our land. I grew up with my grandmother’s stories of her upbringing in Palestine, and with the yearning and longing to go back to our roots.’’
Watching the genocide unfold in Gaza, “opens old wounds’’.
The Return is at the Phee Broadway Theatre in Castlemaine tonight. The performance runs from 6.30pm to 8.30pm.
For tickets visit https://events.humanitix.com/the-return-play-melbourne/tickets