Nowhere

Khalid Abdalla has such a worldly ancestry he’s often heavily questioned when crossing borders.  It might also have something to do with him coming from generations of political protestors, a lineage he celebrates at the Sydney Festival with this lengthy if compelling solo show, Nowhere, directed by Omar Elerian.

He refers in passing to his other roles as an actor, playing the lead in The Kite Runner, Dodi Fayed in the TV series The Crown and a terrorist on board for the film United 93.

Born in Glasgow of Egyptian parents, educated at Cambridge, he recounts his involvement in the many protests of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, his friendships lost, his personal and observed experience of Arabic discrimination post the 9/11, the Hamas terrorist attack in October 2023, and the genocide in Gaza that followed.

His tools are simple, an overhead desk light and camera projecting photos and mobile clips onto a large screen, which dramatically backgrounds him into filmed protests. A metallic curtain surrounds Ti Green’s functional set, dramatically lit by Jackie Shemesh, as Abdalla keeps moving for visual relief, overly contorting into indulgent mimes, freezing into statues or waving his arms. He shakes however with genuine anger chronicling post-Imperial baggage left behind in the Middle East.

But theatrical tricks aside, Abdalla is an attractive convincing presence, witty, even tearful, when expounding how we are all citizens of the world and can together share our hearts and minds to solve its crises. Nowhere derives from a quote by Theresa May: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, then you are a citizen of nowhere.”

And Khalid Abdalla inspires that bigger citizenship, ending powerfully with his belief that the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinians is almost as intolerable as the most horrific genocide of the Jews last century. The audience clapped hard at that.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Helen Murray