The Shroud Maker

Review by Thuranie Aruliah

This moving and darkly comic play tells the story of Palestine over a period of around 70 years from 1946, seen through the eyes of a canny 80 year old woman, Hajja Souad, living in Gaza, who makes a painfully successful living by sewing shrouds for her community. Based on a real woman who amused the author with her enthusiasm for her grim employment, Hajja takes great pride in the detailed work that goes into her shrouds, despite their tragic associations, ever the pragmatist with regard to quality and pricing, exploiting her clients where possible, but showing compassion in the face of genuine distress and need.

She draws the audience further into her world as her story turns from the ghastly present to reminiscences of her childhood in the Palestinian countryside as the much loved daughter of a farmer, displaced from his lands by a kibbutz in the 1940s, and their new, strange lives in Jerusalem as he begins a job as gardener to the British Consul, whilst she is taken up as a kind of pet, by the Consul’s wife. The narrative follows her life through the changing political history of Palestine over the next few decades, as her skills in sewing bring personal fulfilment, but poignancy as everything she stitches with pride and the anticipation of joy, becomes a shroud for those she loves.

This story could be bleak and endlessly tragic, and is particularly pertinent to events in Gaza today – but it is told with humour, wit, irony and compassion. Julia Tarnoky, who has played Hajja for several years, has truly made the role her own, giving a skilled and convincing performance as she moves seamlessly from octogenarian to child, to teenager, to young woman and back to an old woman defying "the death-bringers of Israel" in a final, tragic twist.

An important piece of theatre that tells a heartfelt and dreadful story, with a deceptively light touch.