Come Back Home at Summerhall Review
Home is a complicated thing when the place you come from is also a place you can never quite return to. In Come Back Home, Palestinian artist Fadi Murad attempts to we untangle grief, memory, identity and displacement through a deeply personal solo performance that moves between text, video, sound and surrealist humour.
It is an ambitious piece, and at its best, a moving one. At its centre is the memory of Murad, aged nine, singing “Mad World” at his mother’s memorial. It is an arresting image: childhood innocence colliding with grief, Western pop culture with Palestinian heritage, and the strange rituals we create when confronted with death. Murad is particularly compelling when he allows these personal memories to sit without over-explaining them.
Come Back Home is also a piece that occasionally feels as though it is searching for its own shape.
Its fragmented structure mirrors the fractured nature of memory, but the effect can be more disjointed than dreamlike. Ideas arrive, disappear and re-emerge without always accumulating into a satisfying theatrical journey. The combination of video, sound and live performance is visually intriguing, yet some of these elements feel more illustrative than dramatically necessary. There are moments where the technology seems to be explaining an idea that Murad’s performance has already communicated more powerfully.
The material itself is compelling enough that I found myself wanting the production to trust it more. The connections between his mother’s death, his father’s mortality and his own fear of death are enormously rich. They speak to questions of belonging that are simultaneously deeply individual and profoundly political.
Yet the breadth of these ideas occasionally works against the intimacy of the piece. There is so much Murad wants to interrogate that the emotional through-line can become difficult to follow, and some of the more abstract passages left me admiring the intention rather than feeling fully connected to it.
That is not to say there aren't moments of genuine power. Murad's vulnerability is never in doubt, and his ability to move between comedy, poetry and personal testimony is impressive. When he stops trying to make sense of everything and simply allows us into his memories, Come Back Home becomes considerably more affecting.
This is an important and thoughtful piece of work, with a fascinating perspective and a performer who clearly has much to say.
For me, however, the theatrical form doesn't always match the strength of the material. There is something very powerful at the heart of Come Back Home. I just wanted the production to give it a little more room to breathe.
Come Back Home is playing at Summerhall at 13.15 until 31st August
★★★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
