Review: The Shroud Maker

Business is booming in Gaza for Hajja Souad, the land’s pre-eminent shroud maker. Sitting at her sewing machine, surrounded by a backdrop of inscribed shrouds and with her hair wrapped in a keffiyeh, she is nothing if not an unassailable optimist, buoyed by the almost 100 shrouds a day she must sew to keep up with the demands of grief-stricken relatives and the IDF’s bombs. “Maybe it’s all been worth it,” she wisecracks. “The Nakba, the occupation.”

Written by Gazan theatre-maker Ahmed Masoud and performed in a single, unbreakable monologue by acclaimed actress Julia Tarnoky, The Shroud Maker plays its humour almost unbearably close to the bone, with Tarnoky’s cut glass accent and delightfully liberal use of obscenities landing off-colour humour with sitcom precision. Yet as Souad’s narrative unfolds beyond her present moment (“why don’t you fucking fuck off,” she snaps smartly at an IDF militant on the telephone), the veneer of obsidian black comedy begins to crack and 80 years of Palestinian memory – both personal and political – tangle and unravel like yarn.

Brutal in both scope and detail, Masoud’s script interprets the tragedy of modern Palestinian history not through lenses of geopolitics and power, but through moments of gutting personal loss – of land, of people, of dreams. And as the shroud maker continues to weave her shrouds, a painful mix of tenderness and despair is revealed beneath her well-earned nihilism. The shrouds may put a shekel in her purse, but lying beneath each is a shattered world that Souad herself knows only too well, an interrogation of colonial violence that becomes necessarily, horrifyingly intimate. Every place has its own death rites, its own mortuary culture for confronting the unconfrontable. What becomes of these death rites, The Shroud Maker asks, when the scales of destruction become unfathomable.