Playbill Pick Review: The Shroud Maker at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world with over 3,700 shows. This year Playbill is on board our FringeShip and we’re taking you with us. Follow us as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real Brigadier General!

As part of our coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe, Playbill looks at lots of shows – and we tell you what we think. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide to choosing a show at the festival.

What does a person do when the ravages of war mix with the minutiae of everyday life? How does a person survive a never-ending onslaught of terror and hunger?

Accordingly The Shroud Makerthe new, biting solo show of Palestinian screenwriter and director Ahmed Masoud, they make money.

The play, directed by Julia Tarnoky, depicts Hajja Souad’s lifelong struggle for survival, first as a 10-year-old sold to her father’s British employer, then her journey as a refugee after the collapse of Mandatory Palestine, and through to the early days of the current war between Israel and Hamas. Souad’s story, guided only by her wit and hope, is inspired by a real-life shroud seller Masoud met in 2018. The Shroud Maker is a living timeline that illuminates the trauma of a century in Palestine, told from the perspective of one of the few people who survived that time and grew up.

On a mostly empty stage, draped in thick muslin printed with various shapes, symbols and Arabic words, Tarnoky cuts a startlingly dramatic figure from the start, her keffiyeh haphazardly arranged in a modern image of the woman worn by the world. As she first ventures to her sewing machine and produces “Gucci Corpse Couture to Knock You Dead,” it becomes clear that Souad will be as happy to wear her shroud as to sell it.

Souad’s hands, first inspired by a love of this sewing movement (she sewed beautiful embroidery on a robe for her father), soon use this work as a quick way to make shrouds for her loved ones. “Everything I make becomes a shroud.”

Although Tarnoky is clearly capable, Masoud’s text deserves its four stars for subverting the cliched expectations often attached to art that focuses on the plight of the Palestinian people. While the main character’s saintly “just carry on” energy can be overbearing at times, Masoud has tempered the sentimentality with a snappy wit that finds rhythm after the play’s somewhat shaky opening scene. Once she grabs the audience’s attention and begins to address herself directly, abandoning the fourth-wall pretense of the first sequence, the performance settles down for an hour that mostly holds attention.

With the detached humor familiar to all trauma survivors, Souad weaves the tattered tapestry of her life. “Death is big business in Gaza,” she says. Perhaps it is the only business. Because in her 84 years of life, she says, every moment has been overshadowed by it: the failed attempt to turn Palestine into a British colony. The occupation by Israeli forces that soon followed. Life in a refugee camp, decades in exile in her own country. The Six-Day War. The Palestinian uprising of 1987 and the first Intifada. The ever-encroaching presence of Israel and its brutal impact on her family, which pushed her ever further out to sea.

“Allah has given me two guarantees in this life,” Souad tells the audience at the beginning of the play. “The angel of death and the Israelis.”

If the only constant in your life is death, how long would it take you to adjust? Beautifully embroidered wedding dresses soon become hastily sewn cotton shrouds smuggled in by Egyptian artisans and tunnel traders. War may be good for business, but as Souad sews what she plans to make her own shroud while gunfire rings out in the distance, it becomes clear that there are next to no customers. They’ve all been driven into the ground.

While there is the almighty pressure to survive, life also needs something to survive for– a reason to persevere despite the pain. People are smart when they are cornered, but only when they have hope. But when the source of inspiration dries up and cracks, the willingness to keep fighting dries up too.

Israel and the lack of direct commentary on the current state of war (the play is set in 2018) hang like a shadow over the proceedings. One has to wonder: was this by the programmers’ wish, a developmental obstacle due to the hectic time frame of the Fringe, or a conscious artistic choice by the playwright? With the characters positioned right on the precipice of the current genocide, one flinches but leans forward in anticipation of learning what exactly happened to Souad after her 84th birthday. And yet perhaps the lack of an answer is itself a commentary.

“Of course I speak English,” Souad imagines telling her British captor as a child. “They’ve been holding us captive for 30 years.” Fifty-four years later, little has changed except for the identity of the kidnappers. The trauma of 100 years continues, the bodies are exposed to the elements, and there is no shroud maker in sight.

The Shroud Maker runs until August 24th at the Pleasance 10 Dome. Tickets are available here. Here you can find photos from the production below.

0
from

The Shroud Maker at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe