MILK – Abbey Theatre – Review

The Abbey Theatre presents a Khashabi Theatre / Palestine production MILK مِلْك
Dates – 20 February – 1 March 2025
By Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel

Khashabi Theatre is based in the port city of Haifa in an area which was once known as the Levant. It was founded in 2011 and works “towards a Palestinian society that freely practices art and creativity as a natural right, and strives to renew its cultural identity by placing independent culture front and centre.” It is under Khashabi’s auspices that the Abbey stages this production. According to the Abbey’s promotional material, “It is a powerful visual experience concerned with a disaster. Not with its causes, its type or its consequences but how it divides time in two -before and after- and rift the two apart, turning time into something with no duration or end.”

The stage is almost empty except for a chair and lying beside it a life-sized mannequin, almost like a crash test dummy. The floor consists of what appears to be large dark grey rectangular blocks. There are five of them across the front of the stage and eight rows receding to the back of the stage. All the elements combine together to make a forbidding space.

Gradually the stage is populated by 5 females who each carry a life-sized model. The women cradle their mannequin as if it were a baby needing to be soothed. It is a disturbing image. Each of these women is a mother to the adult corpse but they are living in a destroyed landscape. They need to survive. So they gradually rip up the ordered rows of blocks and pile them haphazardly into a large mound to make some sort of a ramshackle shelter. The dispaced blocks look as if they were the fractured walls of destroyed buildings.

Images pass through the mind of television footage of the war-torn buildings or those shattered by an earthquake. Or for somebody of my generation, it evokes images of destroyed German cities after the Second World War.  In those cities, it was women -Trümmerfrau- who created a new abnormal normality as they “cleaned” mountains of bricks to rebuild. The women here live within the dislocated edifice that the large mound of blocks has become. Within that edifice, a sixth woman gives birth to a young man. So life continues even if it is in an attenuated form. The young man represents hope and a new beginning but his fate is reminiscent of the perpetual destructive cycle of war as described by Pete Seeger in his anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”.

The play lasts approximately an hour and a half without an interval. There is not a word spoken. Because of the repetitive nature of what it is describing it relies on reiteration of bodily movements to depict the everyday struggle to stay alive after a disaster. It is an unsettling watch but it portrays the devastation to ordinary lives that a disaster creates regardless of its origins. It is appropriate to see it given the unsettled times, both environmentally and politically, in which we live.

Credits
Cast: Salwa Nakkara
Cast: Reem Talhami
Cast: Shaden Kanboura
Cast: Samaa Wakim
Cast: Firielle Al Jubeh
Cast: Samera Kadry
Cast: Eddie Dow

Conceived and directed by: Bashar Murkus
Produced by: Khashabi Theatre – Khulood Basel 2022
Scenography : Majdala Khoury
Original Music: Raymond Haddad
Dramaturgy: Khulood Basel
Light Design and Technical Direction: Muaz Al Jubeh
Director Assistant: Abed Al Jubeh
Designer Assistant: Nancy Mkaabal
Stage Manager: Reema Assaf