“ On- and offstage collapse into each other for an hour and a half of theatre-(un)making at its finest.”
Khalid Abdalla’s Nowhere might not take place anywhere in particular, but it certainly happens in a theatre. Everything about the show – the cameras and projectors, the screens pulled open and closed, the house lighting that frequently exposes the audience – is a reminder that we are never, at any point, fools to the artifice of a playhouse. On- and offstage collapse into each other for an hour and a half of theatre-(un)making at its finest.
“It’s safe in here,” Abdalla begins. From the comfort of the theatre, he reminds us that there are many places in the world today where the ground on which people stand is not safe. It is from this boundary of security – between the world we all inhabit comfortably in the familiar darkness of the theatre and the real world just outside the ushered doors – that Abdalla tells his story.
In Nowhere, Abdalla delicately unspools the thread of his career as an activist, artist, friend, and son, picking glass out of wounds made by an increasingly violent and hopeless world. Virgil-like in the calm and humble eloquence with which he guides us down each level of hell, Abdalla proves that art still has a place (perhaps the most important one) in the most troubling of times. It can be a weapon, a salve, and, most importantly, a seedling of hope that even strangers can give one another.
Nowhere rips the veils of entertainment from our eyes, asking, How do we traverse the boundary between theatre and life? Between dream and reality? Between the individual and the collective? And what could art possibly do to help us? It turns out that, when guided by someone of Khalid Abdalla’s artistic caliber, art can do a lot.
At the very least, it can give us a “nowhere” – the only remaining place safe from any kind of claim to the land. It is an imagined space but also a tangibly shared one that comes into being when we invest in a ticket and sit side by side in the dark. It gives us an opportunity to gather regardless of belief and where most other places like it likely don’t exist.
I found myself reflecting on my grandfather – a Holocaust survivor who helped to run a theatre in his Polish ghetto before being transferred to a camp. He had needed to create his own Nowhere – a place he could gather people, transport them to a place of shared resistance, and cling to whatever dregs of hope remained. I have a feeling he would have liked Abdalla’s Nowhere. And if my own is as full of hope and possibility as either of theirs, then that’s where I’d like to plant my seeds of hope for the future too. That’s where I’ll continue to gather.
On- and offstage collapse into each other for an hour and a half of theatre-(un)making at its finest.
Nowhere was a part of the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and played until 24 August. More info on tour dates and venues can be found here: https://fueltheatre.com/projects/nowhere