The Bridge: Shehada's furious solo on a 180m crossing
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- Alaa Shehada stars in and wrote "The Bridge," a solo show tracking his attempt to deliver a jerry can of home-pressed olive oil to his aunt in Jordan across a 180m crossing point.
- The crossing — variously called the Dignity Bridge, the Allenby Bridge, or the King Hussein Bridge depending on political standpoint — subjects West Bank Palestinians to arbitrary closures, endless queues, and random arrests, per the show.
- Sam Beale co-wrote and directed the piece for the Palestine Comedy Club, framing it as a tamer, more focused follow-up to Shehada's earlier show "The Horse of Jenin."
- The olive oil serves not merely as a gift but as a symbol of "a violated land that is being bulldozed by settlers to this day," according to the review.
- Shehada adopts broad physicality across a cast of characters — a self-aggrandising taxi driver, a smothering bus companion, cold-eyed Israeli teenagers manning checkpoints — with stifling heat and ineffective air conditioning as backdrop.
Why it matters: Shehada and Beale use comedy to make the indignity of the 180m West Bank exit — where Palestinians face arbitrary closures, endless queues, and random arrests — legible to outside audiences, packaging a political reality that rarely reaches mainstream stages into a one-man show that travels.
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