Words: Charlie Sampson
Image: Mihaela Bodlovic

3 Stars

Fadi Murad returns to the Fringe with his full-length work Come Back Home, following a scratch performance at last year’s mini festival, ‘Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine’. The production brings fringe theatre back to its roots, using minimalist staging, a handful of essential props, and storytelling delivered with truth and heart.

The work centres on Murad’s experience of losing his mother as a child and the destabilising force of parental loss. Opening with the inner voice of his own self-criticism, it explores how childhood trauma can shape confidence and self-perception for years to come. Throughout, we oscillate between seeing Murad as man and boy.

The production succeeds in taking us from the intimacy of home life at the beginning to a wider political context by the end. Murad parallels his grief for his mother with his grief for his homeland. One particularly beautiful passage imagines bombs being mistaken for shooting stars.

He combines spoken word, cycles of repetition and disintegration, live images and projected text. One of the strongest elements is the use of home videos, including an adorable yet haunting recording of Murad singing Mad World as a child. Watching footage of a grieving child alongside a grieving adult creates a powerful mirroring, enhanced by the eerie melancholy of the sonic world that’s created.

However, the production occasionally struggles to bring its different elements fully together. At times, the audience is left trying to contextualise certain sections of text or actions within the wider narrative. Even so, Come Back Home is an intimate and affecting exploration of grief, memory, identity and home.

Come Back Home
Summerhall – Anatomy Lecture Theatre
13:15
6–31 Aug