Fadi Murad's Come Back Home: loss and water at Edinburgh Fringe
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- Fadi Murad developed Come Back Home from a scratch performance excerpted at last year's four-day "Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine" mini festival staged by Scottish producers, now expanded into a full-length show.
- The piece centers on the death of Murad's mother in a car accident when he was nine, with the artist sharing video footage of his younger self singing "Mad World" by Tears for Fears at her memorial.
- Come Back Home is structured as an impressionistic collage of heavily alliterative poetry, atmospheric video, and low-key clowning — explicitly resisting the conventions of straightforward drama.
- A water motif runs throughout: Murad's mother was a hydrologist, the show includes a baptism in holy water, Murad links water and war, and the piece opens with a striking image of the performer wetting himself under pressure.
- Murad leaves the violence of a "troubled Jerusalem" for the audience to intuit but speaks of those "willing to kill for God," making the personal explicitly political without becoming a strident war play.
- The show runs at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August.
Why it matters: For Edinburgh Fringe audiences, Come Back Home offers a rare encounter with Palestinian storytelling filtered through personal grief rather than overt political messaging — and its origin in a Scottish-organized Palestine solidarity mini-festival shows how cultural partnerships can platform Palestinian artists on major UK stages. The run closes 31 August.
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