Royal Court theatre, London
A woman living in Gaza rehearses her evacuation drill, should an Israeli bomb fall on her family, in Khawla Ibraheem’s scalding one-woman play

If you had five to 15 minutes to flee your home before a bomb flattened it, what would you take? How would you get your family out of a seventh-floor flat? How fast could you run? These hypothetical questions take on chilling reality for a Palestinian woman living under Israeli occupation in Gaza. Khawla Ibraheem’s unnervingly funny (at first) and slowly searing monologue could not be more relevant, although it was first conceived in 2014. That it feels so urgent more than a decade on is all the more tragic.

Developed and directed by Oliver Butler, who previously directed Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzer prize-nominated What the Constitution Means to Me, this too is delivered as a solo female testimony, whimsical at first, then throttling in its grip.