What is the Horse of Jenin? Comedian and theatre maker Alaa Shehada will give us many answers. The toy horse gifted to him as a child by his grandfather as a symbol of freedom; the accompanying reminder to ‘be a horse, not a donkey’; or the five-metre tall sculpture built in 2003 by a German artist and 12 Palestinian teenagers, made from the rubble of houses and ambulances destroyed by the IDF during the second intifada. In 2023, this landmark of Jenin was excavated and hauled away by the Israeli occupation, intended to crush its status as a symbol of Palestinian resilience. Of course, what the settler colonial entity known as Israel constantly fails to understand is that while it can take away the horse, it cannot take away what the horse represents. Every scrap of an ambulance door or family home lives on, dispersed like seeds of unassailable truth. In The Horse of Jenin, Shehada tells us the story of the horse – which is his story too.
From the moment he bursts onto stage, Shehada’s every word shines in the air. He moves from stand-up to memoir to commedia dell’arte, donning burnished red masks to take on the characters that populated his coming-of-age: best friend Ahmad; Jenin’s moustachioed mayor; first love Jumana; and even Jessica, an American acting coach who tells him, studying at the Freedom Theatre, that “the occupation is in your mind”. As he switches between Arabic and English with an irresistible warmth that demands we meet him on stage in our laughter and tears, one is reminded of what Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd wrote about refusing to audition before the reader, and instead, wanting to treat them like a guest in his own living room.
As Shehada stands alone on stage, he summons Jenin into our imaginations: where he and Ahmad smoked their first cigarette, where the oppressive cacophony of machine gunfire is routine. Mime takes on a different, poignant dimension here – at once a reminder of what is physically absent, but also of the intangible spirit of resistance that art can summon back into the room. In grief, joy, and the restorative knife of humour well-sharpened, the horse lives on now, everywhere we look. Let us answer Shehada’s call to take care of it.
The Horse of Jenin, Pleasance Dome, until 25 Aug (not 9, 16, 19, 20), 2.20pm