Review of Sami Abu Wardeh's tour show

Beyond taking potshots at easy targets like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, vanishingly few comedians grapple with big political themes in an artistic zeitgeist dominated by personal stories.

Comedian Sami Abu Wardeh is a rare exception, using not only stand-up but storytelling, hand puppets, dancing, music, cocktail-making and sketch-drawing to draw attention to the plight of people in his native Palestine. And even in his distinctly theatrical show, the current situation is addressed only obliquely, observed instead through a prism of historic colonisations. 

The French occupation of Algeria – and the resistance that finally saw off the genocidal invaders in 1962 – is his main setting. The core story concerns Mediterranean playboy Merguez – ‘like the sausage’ – and his liaison with a glamorous freedom fighter, although Wardeh moves across time and place, also taking in the British colonial damage wrought in Ireland and, of course, Palestine, as well as the present day and recent past.

To cover such a generational and geographic span, the engaging performer intersperses his romantic story of national struggle with upbeat and silly bursts of cabaret and clown-like performance, achieved with minimal grinding of gears as he adjusts the tone. 

Indeed, the comedy moments are made the funnier when set in contrast to the more thoughtful, sombre moments, reflecting the struggle of people under occupation. Chumbawumba’s potent but jaunty The Day The Nazi Died – his walk-on music – sets that tone from the start.

In the complex emotions evoked here, there’s both a guilt that he is larking around on stage while his compatriots suffer, but also an acknowledgment that lightness and frivolity should not be crushed by colonial occupiers, whoever they are. And maybe absurdity is the only (il)logical response to the insanity of war, as previous generations of artists have also found.

Personal stories such as his visit to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, guarded by Israeli officers and his father’s thwarted efforts to fight alongside the PLO, help distil his feelings, though he always punctures the anecdotes with a punchline, if not a silly dance or routine. Meanwhile jokes that start ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Palestinian…’ are both silly and pointed, in keeping with the wider mood of the layered 75-minute show.

‘We cannot undo the pain’ of occupation, he concludes – yet he’s determined the future of his people will be better than their past. That means there will be laughter, and he will be well-placed to provide it.

•  Palestine: Peace De Resistance is at the Park Theatre, London, until Saturday, then on tour this spring. Sami Abu Wardeh tour dates

Review date: 3 Feb 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Park Theatre