Theatre has always been political. And there are few companies who believe that more than Good Chance Theatre. Responsible for refugee-centric works The Jungle, Kyoto, and the globe-trotting puppet project The Walk, they’ve now returned to the stage as producers of A Grain of Sand, a one-woman show about the plights of the children of Gaza. Created by writer-director Elias Matar from real-world testimonials taken from the booklet A Million Kites – each ‘a grain of sand in an endless sea’ – it is an evocative and moving piece of work.
Performed by Sarah Agha, A Grain of Sand centres on the story of Renad, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl. Renad lives in Gaza with her family and longs to be a storyteller. Dressed in dungarees and a pink t-shirt with her hair in braids, she speaks to the audience directly, inviting us into the oral tradition and folk tales passed down to Renad from her twinkly grandmother.
Through her eyes, we learn about the Palestinian people, and how they have survived on hope despite the horrors long inflicted upon them. Nothing exemplifies this more than the story of Anqa, a mythological bird akin to a phoenix that Renad dreams of one day rescuing her and travelling ‘like humans’. As she conjures up Anqa through her words, Renad’s shadow is projected on the draped curtain behind her with wings, bringing her hopes to life when her circumstances stifle them.
Playing a young child comes with challenges for an adult actor. You have to convey innocence without the performance itself feeling immature, to show childlike wonder without becoming, well, a bit annoying. In the case of the distracted, flighty Renad, Agha is more children’s presenter than child, and the portrayal sometimes feels a little exaggerated. It’s actually Renad’s moments of pre-teen petulance that ground the character, like when she sees a classmate in hospital and complains about how the girl always copied her sandwiches at school. It’s a brief moment of levity that still hits hard. A child is still a child in a war zone.
A mound of sand comprises Natalie Pryce’s set, forming the stage from which Renad can command her audience. Yet the more visceral moments come when she takes off her shoes and plunges her feet into the sand. Brits might associate sand with seaside holidays, but Agha makes it clear that it stops feeling like a novelty when it's all you know. As the bombs start falling and the fires rain down, captured in Nick Powell’s swirling soundscape and Dan Light’s sparkling video, the exhaustion taken to traipse over sand, terrified, kicks in.
The show gains momentum with this shift to explicit locations and events we know from the news. Renad is pulled out of her stories and forced to confront reality. She first takes shelter in Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical establishment in the Gaza strip that was raided by Israeli forces, then moves to the Rafah refugee camp. These moments of unrelenting horror jolt us into Gaza’s reality, along with the testimonials of the children of Gaza that are scattered throughout the piece like aid parcels falling from the sky. Some take the form of poetry, but all echo the same sentiments: I want my parents. I miss my friends. When will we be able to go home? Why us?
The most devastating moment comes with Renad’s soft realisation that Anqa isn’t going to rescue her. ‘Nobody is coming for me,’ she says. It’s a crucial reminder of the power of explicitly political theatre: that even when done imperfectly, it makes audiences feel and rallies them to act. I suspect few will buy tickets to A Grain of Sand who are not already empathetic to and enraged by the plight of the children of Gaza; others should, but it seems unlikely. But when the death toll is so high, and other horrific news events vie to steal our attention, it is the human stories that remind us why the people of Palestine need us to keep fighting for them.
In the show’s final moments, the names of Palestinian children killed are projected on screen with their ages. Renad watches, unspeaking, along with the audience. There are hundreds of them; many have their age listed as ‘0 years old’. It’s a powerful, confronting moment of stillness. I’d challenge anyone to sit through this and not be moved – nay, devastated.