The Royal Court’s latest production A Knock on the Roof follows Gaza resident Mariam as she obsessively rehearses for the evacuation of her life. She fears for the moment when the Israeli army will drop a small warning bomb – ‘a knock on the roof’ – giving tenants of Gaza 5-15 minutes to evacuate their homes before they are destroyed. The play is written and performed by Khawla Ibraheem – a playwright, actor, and director based in Majdal Shams, in the occupied Golan Heights – who weaves humour, obsession, and grit into her portrayal of the fear that Gazans face each day.  

Directed and developed by Obie Award winner Oliver Butler (What the Constitution Means to Me), A Knock on the Roof comes to the Royal Court direct from an Off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through Saturday, 8 March. 

The play originally began as a monologue that Khawla Ibraheem had started developing back in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2022, a few years after she met Oliver in the Sundance theatre lab, that she began toying with the idea of a woman preparing for ‘a knock on the roof’. Picking up her monologue again after Covid, her research included interviewing mothers that had lived through wars in Gaza and the Golan Heights in Israel-occupied Syria, as well as reading up on what it is like to train for a marathon. She and Oliver first took the play to the Mercury Store and New York Theatre for workshopping, which led them to be invited to Ramallah for a public reading where it was well received by Palestinian audiences. 

They got a grant to self-produce the play in the Autumn of 2023 and perform it in Haifa and Jerusalem, but the events of 7 October and the war on Gaza that followed stalled their production. 

Cr: Alex Brenner

“A mix of guilt and frustration made me start questioning why I had even thought of writing it, the scenes of the play started to feel too real, and reality itself grew unbearably loud, so I wondered if the play could add anything at all to the horror we witness every single day,” Khawla said. Later in 2024, they found out that theatres in Edinburgh and New York wanted to produce their play, but rehearsals were still stalled and shortened due to the ongoing devastation in many different areas.  

“The play itself embodied this sense of existential crisis. At every step it either didn’t happen or it was about to not happen. The process of the play, and the content of the play ended up being also stuck in the same kind of reality,” Khawla said.  

Finally, rehearsals started to get smoother, and now, she has performed the play over 80 times in the last 6 months.  

Read on for a Q&A with Khawla and Oliver: 

What is A Knock on the Roof about?  

Oliver: A Knock on the Roof is about Mariam, a mother from Gaza training for war. She’s living her regular life, when another war breaks she remembers, from previous wars, that the Israeli military had started using a technique called a knock on the roof, where they alert residents of a building with a small bomb on the roof to give them 5 to 15 minutes to escape. She has this creative inspiration to try and train for it, to see how much she can carry and how far she can run in that amount of time. She becomes obsessed with it, the idea of survival, of figuring out what she is capable of and what matters to her if she’s going to have to leave her house forever.  

Khawla: It’s about Mariam, a woman and a mother that is trying her best to save herself, her son and her mother in a crazy situation, but also in the midst of all this, she’s also trying to maintain herself, her personality, her character. She’s just like any of us, dealing with her own strangers. But hers take place in the middle of a war.  

What makes the play universal?  

Oliver: At its core, it is a play about someone in a terrifying situation, waiting and then preparing. There are ways in which Mariam’s experience in Gaza feels like what it’s like to live in our world today. I’m not saying we all have a similar level of actual, existential threat of war, but we all live in a world now, especially after COVID, where we’re waiting to get some sort of notice of some terrible thing that’s going to change our life. We keep having this recurring experience which tethers us to the warning that we’re going to get a notice that another plane has gone down or another pandemic is starting. Our world has oriented us towards this constant level of preparedness and vigilance to just stay safe. When we watch someone who is in a situation like that, trying to figure out how to prepare and keep their loved ones safe, we immediately connect to it in a human way, and say, that is also my story with a different reality, and I think right now in the world, and everywhere we’ve done the show so far, it’s been proven that that is something that we can relate to.  

How does humour sit in the play? And why is it important for it to be there?  

Khawla: Humour is a magical way to connect to people. Laughter is a reaction. When we laugh, it’s something that we don’t even think about. Something funny happens and we just laugh. And it’s a trick way to make the audience engage in something when you make them laugh, because then something about the conscious relaxes and then the dramatic moments can enter easier when we’ve taken down the walls, when we laugh. People come to the play with certain expectations about how a play about a war in Gaza should sound. But honestly, in our most horrific moments in life, we often grab this moment of joy and laughter as humans, because this is what will make us want to survive for the next day. Otherwise, we’re just going to lose our minds. For me, it’s essential for the play to be funny in order for it to survive.  

Oliver: I think humour is a revelation of things that should not be said or cannot be said or should not be done. When something happens in relief, it’s that surprise of something happening that should not happen, right? I also feel like, at least in America, there is this portrayal of Palestinians as being humourless. You know, as if there’s no humour in their lives. But to me, some of the funniest people I’ve met are Palestinians and people who live in really terrifying situations. Humour is something that cannot be taken away, it is a right, and so I think that this ends up being an incredible opportunity to build connection through how we end up finally saying the things that should not be said, or giving our characters the right to say the things that should not be said or cannot be said. It’s a form of resistance and freedom.  

Alex Brenner

What do you want audiences to take away from the show here in London?  

Oliver: My core hope is that people engage with the human story. I want to release the audience from thinking that this play is asking you to be someone different or do something different. I want them to laugh with Mariam. I want them to engage with the story. I want them to feel the similarities between them and her. I want them to see, at least from my opinion of the way the American media presents Palestinians, a different kind of Palestinian story that they may not be used to hearing. And yeah, I want them to feel connected and closer to Mariam, and then, by association, connected and closer to Gaza, and then hopefully connected and closer to themselves.  

Khawla: If, even for a single moment during the play, someone in the audience thinks I knows what you’re talking about, then my mission is accomplished.  

Each person might connect with Mariam in a different way — through her relationship with her son, her mother, her husband, or even something as simple as the way she prepares her coffee. It doesn’t have to be a profound realization; just one fleeting moment of recognition, one thought of “Yes, I’ve felt that too.” And if they carry that moment with them when they leave, then we’ve done more than just humanize the people we often see reduced to headlines — we’ve stepped into their lives, even if only for an instant.  

I’m not trying to provoke grand revelations, deep philosophical reflections, or overwhelming emotions. My hope is that the story creates a space for connection, where Mariam feels real — not just a character on stage, but someone whose experiences resonate.

The most important thing to understand is that behind every political decision, behind every conflict, there are real human beings paying the price — with their lives, their loved ones, and their dreams. Even before war, Mariam had already lost so much to political decisions beyond her control. She lost her dreams to a reality she never chose. 

By the time the play ends, I hope we all carry a piece of her with us. 

This interview was provided by Royal Court and edited by Audrey Enghauser. A Knock on the Roof is showing at the Royal Court Theatre through Saturday 8 March, with tickets from £15.