The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
What does a person do when the ravages of war become intertwined with the minutiae of every day life? How does a person survive a never ending onslaught of horror and hunger?
According to The Shroud Maker, the new, caustic solo show from Palestinian writer-director Ahmed Masoud, they monetize it.
Performed by Julia Tarnoky, the piece depicts the lifelong survival struggle of Hajja Souad, first as a 10-year-old bartered to her father's British employer, then her journey as a refugee of Mandatory Palestine's collapse, and all the way through to the early days of the current Israel–Hamas war. With little more than her wit and her hope to guide her, Souad's story is inspired by a real life shroud seller Masoud met in 2018. The Shroud Maker is a vivid timeline of a century's worth of trauma in Palestine, told through the recollections of one of the few to have survived it to maturity.
Presented on a mostly bare stage, draped in thick muslin printed with various shapes, symbols, and Arabic words, Tarnoky cuts a startlingly dramatic figure from the jump, her keffiyeh haphazardly arranged in a modern day picture of the world worn woman. Laboring first from her sewing machine, making “Gucci Corpse Couture to Knock You Dead,” it becomes clear that Souad is just as likely to wear her own shroud as she is to sell it.
Souad's hands, first inspired to these sewing movement by love (stitching beautiful embroidery onto a robe for her father), are soon adapting that same work into hastily adapted burial shrouds for those she loves. “Everything I make becomes a shroud.”
While Tarnoky is clearly capable, it is Masoud's text that earns its four stars, subverting the cliched expectations often heaped upon art centering on the plight of the Palestinian people. While the saintly "just keep moving forward" energy of the central character can be cloying at times, Masoud has tempered the sentimentality with a jagged wit that kicks into rhythm after the play's somewhat shaky opening scene. Once she catches the eye of the audience and begins direct address, abandoning the first sequence's fourth wall pretext, the performance settles in for a mostly attention-holding hour.
In the detached pitch of humor recognizable to all trauma survivors, Souad weaves the tattered tapestry of her life. "Death is big business in Gaza," she states. Perhaps, it is the only business. For within her 84 years of life, she recounts, every moment is marred by it: The failed attempt at turning Palestine into a British colony. The occupation of Israeli forces that was soon to follow. Life in a refugee camp, exiled within her own country for decades. The Six-Day War. The 1987 Palestinian Uprising and the First Intifada. The ever-encroaching presence of Israel, and its brutal impact on her family, pushing her ever further out to sea.
“Allah has provided me two guarantees in this life,” Souad tells the audience at the top of the play. “The angel of death, and the Israelis.”
When the only constant in your life is death, how long would it take for you to adapt? Beautifully embroidered wedding gowns soon become hastily assembled cotton shrouds, smuggled in through Egyptian mechanics and tunnel traders. War may be good for business, but as Souad stitches away at what she intends to be her own shroud, gunfire blazing in the distance, it becomes clear that clientele are all but non-existent. They have all been forced into the ground.
While there is the almighty pressure to survive, life also requires something to survive for—a reason to endure, despite the pain. Humans are clever when cornered, but only if they are inspired to hope. But when the well of inspiration is dried and cracked, so too is one's willingness to keep fighting.
Israel, and the lack of direct comment on the current state of the war (the play takes place in 2018), hangs somewhat like a shadow over the proceedings. One has to wonder: Was this at the request of the programmers, a developmental hiccup caused by the hectic timeframe of the Fringe, or an intentional artistic choice of the playwright? As the characters are positioned right on the precipice of the current genocide, one flinches away yet leans forward, expecting to know just what happened to Souad after her 84th birthday. And yet, the absence of an answer is, perhaps, commentary in and of itself.
“Of course I speak English,” Souad imagines telling her British keeper as a child. “You’ve been occupying us for 30 years.” 54 years later, and little has changed except for the identity of the captors. The trauma of 100 years continues on, bodies bare to the elements without a shroud maker in sight.
The Shroud Maker runs at Pleasance 10 Dome through August 24. Get tickets here. See photos from the production below.
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
Julia Tarnoky in The Shroud Maker
