Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Come Back Home
Fadi Murad
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Come Back Home is a deeply personal exploration of the weight of the past that one carries in the present and might continue to carry into the future. Through text, video and sound, Palestinian artist Fadi Murad questions how loss shapes ambition, identity and the idea of return through personal experience and memory.
Review
Fadi Murad stands in front of a blackboard, writing something vaguely. He turns around, revealing that his pants are wet. Did he wet himself? People often lose bladder control when they die of a sudden shockwave. The performance is chilling from the get-go.
Murad goes on to meet another character, calls him “Fadi!”. He calls him “Fadi” as well. Are they going to hug, are they going to kill each other? Another Fadi appears. Everyone is him. He is everyone. In the poster of the show, Fadi holds an umbrella for another Fadi who is drenched, but there is no rain above them. How is Fadi drenched then? What purpose does the umbrella serve? Why is Fadi trying to protect Fadi?
His body carries the weight of his story. His presence never feels light during the show. And that’s just an observation, not a criticism. He tries to make some jokes, but it’s never funny. It’s deeply sad. He knows it’s not funny, he knows it can’t be funny. And yet humour seems like the only way to navigate this grief.
The performance often uses film to show glimpses of his past. Some are poetic visual performances, some are documentary videos from his personal life. These create an eerie sense of realism within the absurdity with which Murad does the rest of the piece. Apart from Murad’s gut-wrenching performance, this piece is held together by a wonderful soundscape. The subtle technical elements come together beautifully to leave us with a profound experience.
Murad talks about his mother who died at a young age, his land that is occupied and the intense helplessness he feels while not having control over anything. At a breaking point in the show, he asks the audience if they know the pain of constantly living in uncertainty. How to deal with uncertainty is a question almost everyone would’ve encountered at some point. Yet nobody knows enough about it to console a Palestinian.
Strikingly, Murad doesn’t mention Palestine. But we all know what he’s referring to. We know who he refers to when he talks about the ones controlling him. In a brilliant moment of vulnerability and poetry, Murad talks about people’s habit of questioning too much. Questioning everything doesn’t allow you to embody it. You separate it from yourself, you “other” it. Murad is tired of being othered. He wants to belong. To his mother. To his homeland. To himself.
And yet Murad doesn’t other anyone. He shows great empathy to the ones responsible for his trauma. It would’ve been quite easy for him to villanise those responsible and show his anger. But he shows understanding, compassion and great resilience. Why is the onus of empathy on the victim? Everyone seems to have some opinion about Palestine, but we rarely see conversations around the mental state of Palestinians. What does a person mentally go through while seeing the deaths of so many children? Or while living under constant bombardment but trying to empathise with those doing the bombing? How are we letting this happen? When will we collectively reach this stage of the conversation?
Come Back Home is a must-see at this year’s fringe for me, for the importance it carries in the world today and for its brilliant writing, staging and performance.
