Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video.

The clown paints his face to become someone else —

to live in another reality.

With white paint, a few colors, and a red nose,

he can turn tragedy into comedy.

He can walk into a hospital room,

where someone lies dying,

and turn him into a laughing child.

He can enter a refugee camp

and make it a festival

.…

He paints his face,

puts on the nose —

and for a moment,

he’s allowed to dream again.^[1]

The Clown is a gripping one-man play that delivers far more than its simple title might suggest. At its center is Sobhi (Ezzat Al-Natsheh),  a Palestinian clown performer whose painted smile conceals a churning inner world of joy, humiliation, pain, hope, and unrelenting self-doubt. The play follows Sobhi, who is haunted by the traumatic car crash that happened to him and his friend while they were driving to a birthday performance in the rain. Throughout the monologue, Sobhi argues with a second voice, “the Clown,” a manifestation of his inner critic, that alternately mocks, seduces, and confronts him about his lifelong need to please others, his humiliation and bullying, and his guilt over surviving when others did not. As Sobhi recounts memories of family violence, political repression, and the daily humiliations of life under occupation, the clown persona becomes both a survival strategy and a trap that feeds on others’ laughter while concealing his despair. By the end, Sobhi briefly removes the red nose in an attempt to reclaim himself, but ultimately puts it back on, acknowledging that the cycle of performance, masking pain with laughter, will continue.

I first encountered this work in rehearsal on August 28, 2025, at El Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre while I was in Palestine. Two weeks later, on opening night, I was already back in the United States, so my friends helped me watch the performance via a WhatsApp video call, a surprisingly intimate way to witness the performance from afar. I could hear my friends laugh and cry throughout the performance as they sat in the red velvet seats of one of my favorite theatres, while I laughed and cried from my couch in the US. I was grateful for the solution that allowed me to witness a play I had been anxiously anticipating by a team I hold in high esteem.

The play’s concept originates with Al-Natsheh himself and draws directly from his life story. He shared the material with Mariam Basha, who crafted the script and served as assistant director and choreographer alongside Kamel El Basha, who directed the production. I had previously collaborated with Al-Natsheh on El Manshiyyeh, which I co-directed with Samer Al-Saber, but I’ve also known him for years through his work with the famed Jerusalem clown duo Zaatar and Sim Sim (he is, of course, Sim Sim), as well as his collaborations with Red Noses Palestine.^[2] A little-known fact about Al-Natsheh–he keeps a nose on him at all times because sometimes someone around him needs joy, and he is just the one to deliver it. Also, he is often recognized in public as Sim Sim, so the nose allows him to get in and stay in character with/for the kids who recognize him. Al-Natsheh is quick-witted, intellectually agile, and an extraordinarily funny performer. This piece, however, revealed a different register of his artistry.

In the opening moments, he applies his makeup onstage, transforming himself into the clown before the audience’s eyes and setting the tone for the performance to come. The text of the play begins with Sobhi describing a fragmented memory of being in a car accident and the feeling of being trapped and unable to scream as the other person in the car dies. He asks: “Why was it me who stayed alive? … I’ll never know what he wanted to tell me.”^[3] This tragic car accident serves as one of the play’s anchoring images, its rain-soaked violence symbolizing both literal and psychic rupture. Rain becomes a recurring motif that is at once cleansing and wounding, a metaphor for memory, endurance, and the cyclical nature of grief. Water washes over the narrative as Sobhi attempts to peel back the layers of performance that shield him from his own vulnerability.           

Interruptions are key to the play. Phone calls frequently interrupt the scenes with people calling Sobhi to offer clown jobs, and we see that he is constantly negotiating work under stressful conditions. In the series of phone conversations, the difficult circumstances of work as a clown are revealed: short notice, low pay, unsafe environments, and often unrealistically high expectations. Other memories also intrude, contributing to the play's fragmented nature. For instance, Sobhi recalls being eleven years old and living with his grandfather, who burned his belongings and constantly insulted him. This bullying carried over to other facets of his life, as he remembers being bullied by his peers for his height and appearance.

The crux of the play lies in the interruptions where Sobhi speaks with “the Clown,” a figure who interjects, comments, argues, and mocks him. They volley between dark humor, confession, and near-prayer, their exchanges revealing a fractured sense of self shaped by personal trauma and the suffocating pressures of social and political life. The Clown criticizes Sobhi for being too kind, for letting people walk over him, and for depending on others’ approval. Sobhi tries to defend himself, but the dialogue shows how entangled they are. At times, the Clown sounds like a bully; at other times, he praises Sobhi and even becomes affectionate. Their battlesome relationship is at the center of the play, and it was what I, as an audience member, wanted to know more about.

In a quieter scene that reveals his inner turmoil, Sobhi prays aloud, asking God for relief and strength (Image 1). As he speaks, he reflects on what a clown can do, such as bringing laughter to hospitals and refugee camps, offering brief moments of joy amid hardship. These reflections frame the emotional spine of the play: memories of childhood humiliation, emotional neglect, and constant belittlement for failing to embody the expectations of masculinity. Those wounds follow him into the present, where he struggles as a clown who barely makes ends meet, trapped in a society that relies on him for laughter yet mocks the very profession that sustains him.

The Clown, both tormentor and truth-teller, relentlessly probes Sobhi’s insecurities, accusing him of cowardice, failure, and complicity in his own suffering. Their confrontation builds toward the play’s central question: whether Sobhi’s clowning is an act of degradation or a source of purpose. Near the end, the Clown urges Sobhi to “take off the nose.” Sobhi removes it, and the Clown insists that without it, he cannot exist. Sobhi resists, declaring that he is “done performing,” and attempts to walk away. Yet in the moment of refusal, Sobhi recognizes what gives his life meaning. He chooses to put the red nose back on—not as submission, but as an affirmation of the role he has claimed for himself.

Without this… who am I?

Without the laughter… who remembers me?

Maybe the clown is the only part of me that’s still alive.

The stage’s visual composition echoes the play's themes. The scenography was deceptively minimal. At the center of the stage lay a patterned carpet that served as a grounding place for the story. Upstage right sat a mound of pastel balloons, eight or more in various soft colors, an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the psychological terrain of the piece. On the opposite side rested a wooden chair draped with a ukulele, topped with a rubber chicken, and accompanied by a red-and-blue striped stand for a computer. The center was left open, allowing the dueling figures, Sobhi and the Clown, ample room to spar, circle one another, and, in Sobhi’s case, to dance. Al-Natsheh transitioned between the two characters simply by sharply turning; when he faced stage right, we knew the Clown was talking in his aggressive and often belittling voice. When he faced stage left, Al-Natsheh was the one in the lead, responding and reasoning with the Clown. The production extended this sense of divided identity into the costume itself. The costume design sharpened the performance’s tonal dissonance: a one-piece clown suit with light blue sleeves and hip pockets, bisected into pink on one side and yellow on the other, its bowtie reversing the colors so that pink and yellow contrasted each other. The result was both whimsical and faintly disquieting, perfectly attuned to the play’s oscillation between humor and unease.

Kamel El Basha’s direction provides a steady hand throughout the production, while Mariam Basha’s choreography introduces dances that offer moments of levity and deepen the play’s emotional texture. Al-Natsheh’s acting is remarkably agile, shifting seamlessly between characters—signaled subtly by whether his hair is tied back in a ponytail or left down.

What makes The Clown so resonant as a production is the intimate character study at its core. Laughter emerges as both lifeline and trap: an act of resistance against despair, yet also a performance demanded by others that gradually erodes the self. Through the protagonist’s exchanges, the play exposes the gendered and political dimensions of his pain, revealing how patriarchal expectations of strength, the violence of occupation, and the indignities of precarity conspire to “castrate” him emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, The Clown becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to continue performing joy in a world that constantly humiliates and silences. Blending absurdist comedy with piercing confession and poetic repetition, the play offers a powerful and unsettling portrait of identity under pressure—an unforgettable image of a man struggling to endure, create, and hope while caught between the demands of the world and the echoing chambers of his own mind.