One can easily detect the satirical humour in The Shroud Maker similar to Gogol’s Dead Souls. On stage, you see a savvy old lady—the shroud maker—proudly presenting her products and explaining how the war has boosted her business. She evokes the image of an enthusiastic door-to-door salesman, providing unnecessarily detailed descriptions of her goods—in this case, the high-quality cotton she uses to make shrouds, under which many Palestinians have been laid to rest.
While perceptions of the tragic events in Palestine often rely on generalised imagery, Ahmed Masoud’s script centres on specific imagery: “shroud”, tracing the evolving role of needlework in our heroine’s life. Embroidery was a part of family education, a gesture of affection to loved ones, a useful craft that promised a new life, before it turned into a shroud, with which our heroine wrapped the bodies of her family members, a blanket, with which she swaddled an abandoned newborn on the street.
The shrouds preserved the joy and pain, the gains and losses of the heroine’s youth and motherhood. But it’s time to be realistic: she decided to turn shroud-making into a profitable business. Why not gain something from the loss? Zooming in on the social disruptions in Palestine, The Shroud Maker attempts to transform a heart-breaking drama into a comedy, where a victim of history becomes the maker of her own fate.
However, this goal might be too ambitious for a solo performance. The time span in the script is challenging, as is the multi-character narrative. While Julia Tarnoky’s cartoonish physical language creates effective comic moments early in the show, the unfolding life story of the shroud maker demands greater psychological depth and nuance in her performance. It is a pity that Tarnoky’s acting hardly differentiates the various stages of the heroine’s life and several intensive, tragic moments are delivered crudely. It is even more frustrating when the direction and set design make little effort to liven the storytelling.
Despite the effort to reflect on individual fate in a chaotic time, The Shroud Maker gives a rather superficial portrait of a Palestinian woman’s life without delving into the sophistication of the character and her situation. It leaves you with the lingering thought: I wish they had done more with this scene.
