Dina Ibrahim’s play is based on real life and her own family’s history. The writer and actress plays her own grandmother, Um-Kamal (Mother of Kamal), an illiterate, Jewish, working-class woman living in a poor part of Baghdad in 1948, a year after the end of the British occupation of Iraq. She has a hard life, losing babies to stillbirth or early death, but she has a strong spirit and Ibrahim plays her with passionate commitment.
Before the Second World War, Baghdad was a city where different faiths lived side by side with mutual tolerance, but that is now breaking down, antisemitism is rife and, with the kingdom aligned with the West, the authorities are cracking down on suspected communists.
When the Secret Police come knocking, Um-Kamal’s sons Kamal and his younger brother Sasson are arrested. Without explanation, Kamal is released while Sasson is sentenced to nine years in prison. Mother and the brothers each feel they know the reason but it is not until decades later that the truth is shared between them and the guilt they have felt is lifted.
Dina Ibrahim imbues Um-Kamal with feeling, arms outstretched and her hands sometimes quivering with emotion, but a strong accent and often shrill tones make her sometimes difficult to understand.
Director Stephen Freeman has everyone playing with a similar accent. Though the storyline comes through, it makes it harder to follow the plot and more difficult to distinguish characters when the cast are playing multiple roles. That raises the old question of why use an accent when they are all speaking the same language.
Mirdrit Zhinipotoku and Jojo Rosales present Kamal and Sasson from children playing together through to middle age, including flashbacks in the memory of grown men. Sasson maintains the idealism of his socialist principles and is critical of Israeli society where, having previously been discriminated against for being Jewish, he now finds himself discriminated against for being Iraqi. Kamal too, a doctor creating a successful new life in America, still seeks to serve his fellow men.
Although this is a deeply serious fragment from the Jewish diaspora story, it is lightened with moments of comedy as in the banter between Rosales’s barber and Manav Chaudhuri and Nalân Burgess as his customers, or a scene were Um-Kamal engages Chaudhuri’s scribe to pen her an appeal to the authorities. They also play a succession of other roles from neighbours to policemen.
The staging is simple, a rostrum with furniture to one side as the heart of the family home in Baghdad with occasional beds and other elements varied or pulled into the remaining space ready to start a new scene. Some of these changes and occasional exits and entrances are given stylised choreography that sticks out like a sore thumb, and, together with a prelude to the second act with a stretch-out being of tea and awkward rolling on the ground, it undermines the sincerity with which the cast approach their roles.
This production of The Mother of Kamal has its flaws, but it makes you want to know more. Maybe that can be found in the book by Dina’s father (Um-Kamal by Fawzi Ibrahim), which is its primary source and directly provides some of the dialogue.