Khashabi, the Haifa-based Palestinian theatre company have partnered with the Abbey Theatre to bring MILK مِلْك to Dublin. The powerful visual experience uses dance and movement to express the loss and despair felt in the aftermath of disaster. The play is a collaboration by director and playwright, Bashar Murkus and dramaturg, Khulood Basel. Together they manage Khashabi Theatre in Haifa, which was co-founded with a group of Palestinian theatre makers. Frequent collaborators, the pair specialises in creating original work that strives to combine political issues with a human element, foregrounding culture.
The female led production opens with an ensemble of women grieving the loss of their adult children, and their motherhood, as they rock and console mannequins in their arms. The mannequins, covered in holes, serve as a reminder throughout the play of what is lost. However, it is the people who are left behind, and often forgotten about, that is the key focus of the production. The production touches on how women are often left out of the representation of war, as the mannequins are used to block the women out of a family portrait.
With no dialogue the performance relies on the power of movement to convey the complex emotions of the piece. The cast remain cohesive and strong from beginning to end in this eighty minute, physically demanding, ensemble piece. The image of lost motherhood propels the piece forward. Tabloids of women cooing and reassuring absent loved ones are repeated throughout the performance as the women reminisce and grieve for their families. Grieving motherhood manifests itself in the outpouring of breast milk which floods the Abbey’s stage.
The flooded stage adds another layer to the dance in the second half of the play which is coupled with the birth of the play’s son, played by the superb Eddie Dow. Dow’s performance begins with his birth and his mothers death. The particularly moving scene depicts the mother giving birth alone in the rubble as Dow emerges still attached to his dead mother by an umbilical cord. As the child tries to move and grow he is pulled back by the umbilical cord and slips on the soaked Abbey stage- a stark reminder of the children suffering.
A true highlight is the original score by Raymond Haddad that beautifully mirrors the emotion of the actors and builds and optimises silences. The piano’s single repeated note ringing across the empty stage was a powerful opening, truly the calm before the storm.
The play is visually stunning, with technical and lighting design by Muaz Al Jubeh. The set seems minimal when the play opens to an almost bare stage. However the grey slabs that create the stage floor are gradually ripped up and strewn about the stage. By the end of the play the grey slabs that once were the foundation of the stage, are stacked haphazardly on top of each other, to create the striking image of a city left in ruin.
MILK مِلْك premiered at Khashabi Theatre in 2022. Speaking on their production the pair note, “Three years ago, we thought we had succeeded in MILK مِلْك in creating a theatrical poem about what wars leave behind. But over the past three years, as “real wars” have crushed people before our eyes and stolen everything they love, we have come to realise how incapable theatre is of capturing even a single moment of war.” This may be, however, the final image of the women lying in the rubble, has a new resonance following Israel’s destruction of Gaza. And as the women definitely stare out at the audience, we are reminded that we must not look away.
MILK مِلْك has toured from Haifa to the Venice Biennale to the Festival d’Avignon and now Dublin. The production is bound for London next year. The production ran from 20th February – March 1st at The Abbey Theatre, main stage.
