'The Horse of Jenin' review — this Palestinian coming-of-age tale brilliantly mixes compassion, conviction and comedy

Read our review of The Horse of Jenin, written by and starring Alaa Shehada, now in performances at the Bush Theatre to 20 December.

Summary

• The Horse of Jenin is written and performed by Alaa Shehada
• He shares his experience of growing up in a refugee camp in Palestine
• The show's title refers to a real-life sculpture of a horse which comes to signify resistance

A breakaway hit at this past summer’s Edinburgh Festival makes a winning and necessary transfer to the studio space at the Bush Theatre, where writer-performer Alaa Shehada’s pointed and funny reminiscence will get an upgrade to the main stage in January.

The genial, burly man on view before us is “Alaa,” he says, “not Allah,” as part of the warm-up act of a show that has its origins in the Palestine Comedy Club – itself an entity that I had no idea about until this production.

And for the first 10 minutes – maybe more – Shehada works the room, singling out a New Yorker in amiably snarky exchanges and testing our capacity to laugh as required and also when to emit an interested hum that itself speaks to audience engagement. (When that reaction occurs spontaneously during the show’s unbroken 75 minutes, Shehada calls attention to it on cue.)

Shehada, one feels, could continue in freewheeling mode for quite some while. Instead, he comes bearing a story about a five-metre-high horse, built by a German artist in Jenin in the West Bank in 2003 out of scrounged metal, that went on to be destroyed by the IDF 20 years later. A replica of the horse is on view in the indoor foyer of the Bush, the structure bedecked with testimonials to Palestinian resistance – and to the very will to endure that the horse itself symbolises.

The production is artfully structured, abetted by Sam Beale as co-writer and comedy consultant and co-directors Thomas van Ouwerkerk and Katrien van Beurden: the presence of these Dutch theatre-makers is of a piece with the news, imparted during the show, that Shehada has made an Amsterdam houseboat his home.

Performing on a bare stage, a table of masks to one side and floor mic to the other, Shehada tells his tale from the beginning, from infancy through to schooldays, and charting his burgeoning friendship with a classmate called Ahmad.

Romance features in his courtship of a young woman who has – we come to discover – an unfortunate number of brothers, and Shehada’s mother emerges especially vividly, her son’s passion for performance not quite tallying with her own career hopes for the boy. (She thinks he’s studying engineering.) The Freedom Theatre in Jenin mounts a production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker with Shehada cast as the psychotic Aston, but it’s up to playgoers to draw what connections they will between Pinter’s abstract landscape and the wartime environs that have marked out Shehada’s entire coming of age in a refugee camp.

At times, the breaking of the fourth wall seems to puzzle the parties concerned – spectators are silenced for intruding when not wanted, even as clap-alongs are encouraged elsewhere. And I doubt I was the only one keen to hear yet more about a world unknown to most of us and here presented without sentimentality but with abundant humanity: this is a play driven by people (and one four-legged mammal), not agitprop.

Shehada finds comedy in a continued registry of his weight over the years which leaves off at the present day, and he movingly gives the curtain call over to footage of the actual horse so that we can register its fate directly for ourselves.

Comparisons are made to the Trojan horse, and English audiences may be put in mind of War Horse, the last show in my experience to value the equine in quite this way. But The Horse of Jenin is singular in both its compassion and conviction and its commitment to the salvific value of storytelling. The horse itself lives on in this speaker’s memory and, thanks to him, in ours.

The Horse of Jenin is at the Bush Theatre to 20 December, and will also play 14-22 January 2026. Book The Horse of Jenin tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Horse of Jenin (Photos by Harry Elletson)