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Nowhere – Here & Now Showcase

 
Alec Martin Review by Alec Martin 3 Published: 16 Aug 2025 Traverse Theatre Show Dates: 12 Aug 2025-24 Aug 2025

Nowhere, Khalid Abdalla’s solo “anti-biography”, directed with cool care by Omar Elerian, maps a life across turbulent histories: from Glasgow in the 80s, to Egypt’s 2011 uprising, Britain’s “citizens of nowhere” rhetoric, and today’s war in Gaza. The form is deliberately collage-like – spoken testimony, phone footage, an old-school slide carousel, precise light and sound, bursts of movement, even a quick, creative audience task. The shifting vocabulary is as much the argument as the content: complexity doesn’t tidy up.

Provocative and humane, formally rich if not uniformly tight.

Abdalla’s presence anchors it all – warm, lucid, principled, and generous with doubt. The design team create a handsome, nimble media environment that elevates the essay into theatre without sanding away its edges. When the threads align, the show crackles: a fervent Gaza passage where testimony and image finally run on a single emotional line; a sly physical sequence where the body says what speech can’t; and the audience-drawing beat that quietly reframes spectators as co-witnesses. These moments feel genuinely civic – poignant, resilient, now-here.

Yet the collage sometimes sprawls. The piece cycles through lecture, confession and rally so frequently that focus blurs; it explains, then re-explains, as if unwilling to trust what’s already landed. A few autobiographical detours feel tangential rather than cumulative, and the 90–100 minutes without an interval begin to tell – the final third in particular would benefit from a firmer edit. The sensory hits (haze, strobe, loud sound) add atmosphere, but occasionally play as punctuation where cutting would be cleaner.

The result is a compelling, intellectually alive act of witness: provocative and humane, formally rich if not uniformly tight. If you prize ambition and political clarity, you’ll feel its charge. If coherence is your north star, the overstuffing may nag.

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The Blurb:

In this intricate and playful solo show, inspired by his involvement in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and the counter-revolution that followed, actor and activist Khalid Abdalla (United 93, The Kite Runner, The Crown) takes us on a journey into his history, set against a cartography of seismic world events. From the histories of colonialism and decolonisation; friendship and loss; protests and uprising against regimes across the world; to the violence in Gaza following the events of October 7th 2023, Khalid brings together the personal and the political in an act of anti-biography. HereAndNowShowcase.uk