Come Back Home review – loss and love in Palestinian artist’s intriguing fringe hour
Last year, a group of Scottish producers staged a four-day mini festival called Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine. One of the excerpts was a scratch performance by Fadi Murad, which now returns as a full-length show. It is not a conventional drama. Rather, Come Back Home is structured with the free-ranging imagination of a poet, an impressionistic collage that resists straightforward interpretation.
Murad’s theme is one of loss and the pull of home, focusing in particular on the death of his mother in a car accident when he was nine. He speaks touchingly from a child’s perspective of what it meant to lose the nurturer in his life, the one he turned to in just such a moment of distress. And he shares video footage of his younger self singing Mad World by Tears for Fears at her memorial. It is as cute as it is sad.
That death was formative; elsewhere in the performance, he leaves the violence and killings of a troubled Jerusalem for us to intuit, although he does talk of those who are willing to kill for God. This is not a war play in any strident sense: its reflections are more personal and elliptical, even if, in such circumstances, the personal is political.
From his passages of heavily alliterative poetry, atmospheric video and low-key clowning, a theme of water emerges: his mother was a hydrologist, there is a baptism in holy water, a link between water and war, and a striking opening image of Murad wetting himself – a forlorn figure, man or boy, under horrific pressure.
Impressionism can only go so far and we could do with a clearer key to unlock what Murad has to say, but he has a gentle, endearing energy that keeps the show always intriguing.
