Edinburgh Fringe 2026
MAJENIN – A Palestinian Love Story
Kufiya Comedy, Pleasance, Aisha Josiah, and Passion Pit Theatre
Genre: Comedy, Solo Performance, Solo Show, Stand-Up
Venue: Pleasance Dome
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
“Majenin means ‘crazy people’ in Arabic. The Palestinian rom-com you’ve been waiting for: a tale of two fools who dare to love in a world obsessed with their sadness. Torn between New York, London and Palestine, the only place they truly feel at home is inside of their shared madness. Writer/performer Marena Riyad joins award-winning director Maiya Pascouche (4 Girls The First Letter E) and producer Aisha Josiah (Dickless). Blending theatre and stand-up, it’s an intimate, satirical, poetic occupation of the heart.”
Review
Marena Riyad is an accomplished stand-up comedian, assured and on top of her material. She is at ease with crowd work that feels authentic and, even as she banters with her audience, is also rooted in humanity. She’s playful with her crowdwork but not cruel or humailating. This enables the audience to lean in to both the comedy and the theatre that sits at the heart of this just over an hour long show. It’s a daring conceit because what we have here is a stand=up theatre sandwich. The show is topped and tailed with short episodes of stand-u[ with a fully rounded play in the middle. And it works as a blended format. It is rare to see that format but it enables our stand-up host to step into her own self-written theatrical narrative.
After meeting at one of Marena’s New York comedy gigs, a Palestinian comedian and a Palestinian artist begin a romantic relationship. Their romance is tested by distance, travel between New York, London and Palestine, family pressures and conflicting expectations of love. As the relationship becomes more difficult, Marena’s sense of self begins to fracture under the emotional strain, as she tests love and love tests her. For love manifests in different ways, strained by family and cultural roots and expectations. It is also shaped and defined by our own evolving selves. At the heart of the play is Marena’s own search for a certainty that might just elude her, as it eludes us all at different times in our lives.
There is potential here for that drama to be tightened and more precisely blocked as the stand-u[ turns into a three hander.
Overall MAJENIN, A Palestinian Love Story is an engaging hour of theatre, an exploration of love in the context of Palestinian culture, both in the homeland and away from it. It is, more deeply, an exploration of home, both in terms of cultural heritage and feeling truly at home in our romantic selves.
There is sharp comedy in this observational play that gets into some important questions. Is cowardice a form of love? Do cultural expectations allow a woman to be a lover and not only the default of a mother? And is that really a binary choice? The trauma of what is happening in Palestine is both backdrop and a reality that plays into such questions. in a play that enables the stand-up host to use theatre as an additional form of inquiry to her usual stand-up routines.
I found myself drawn in. There is also scope to block the action more precisely and some dramaturgy around the interplay of the comedic and more serious drama will help finesse the piece.
Overall this an intriguing, affecting show, sincere, heartfelt, penetrating its subject, playful with both stereotypies and more nuanced character.
