On August 26th 2025 we performed a version of The Gaza Monolgues by Ashtar Theatre at Riverside Studios.
Eight actors are on stage reading the Gaza Monologues in the small River Room at Riverside Studios which overlooks Hammersmith Bridge. One hundred people have packed in to listen. My niece who is half Lebanese has made Palestinian food. Our Lighting Designer Craig West has created a perfect focussed warmth for the actors to live in on stage. Our musician Mercedes Maresca is tuned in to the suffering and courage of the words and is accompanying them with her chimes and singing bowls. On the walls are panels created by “Stitch Their Names Together.” Hand stitched onto each panel are the names of the Gazan dead since October 2023, and on each panel, there are over one hundred names and there are hundreds of panels.
"I don't know what and how to thank you, thank you for your feelings and emotions, thank you for your kind hearts, thank you for your concern for us, thank you for everything you did for us."
- Tamer Nijim
For our event this evening, they have lent us twenty panels, which we have hung around the space. In the corner of the room where I am sitting is a TV screen, away from the created beauty but essential for our performance. We are using the TV to connect via a Zoom link to the Palestinian writers of the monologues who live in Gaza. Via the TV screen in the corner of the River Room the writers are listening to their stories from their tents and makeshift homes in the ruins of their land.
I have lived with their names for weeks now, as I curated a structure for this performance, connecting the original monologues of 2010, written when the writers were just 15 years old, to their most recent words of 2024, with the Flute Theatre actors first reading the younger speech followed immediately by the older, allowing us all to bear witness to their journeys from boyhood to fatherhood, from being a daughter to being a mother. Journeys that have been lived with a backdrop of oppression, grief and unimaginable bravery. One of the actors begins to cry as she reads her older story, of a family destroyed. She’s fighting back her tears, but they fall all the same. She keeps reading, her whole soul dedicated to the purpose. She kneels unsteadily to the floor to carry on. The room is a hush; everyone completely focussed on communicating to the actor with our silent concentration that we are with her and that we are crying too. She gets through the monologue. I am filled with love for her in these moments.
The Gaza Monologues, Flute Theatre
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