Art in the Midst of Conflict: Exploring Gaza in Ahmed Masoud’s New Play

The Gazan novelist and playwright, Ahmed Masoud, believes passionately that art is necessary even when bombs are falling, tanks are flattening homes, and families are starving and dying.

“It is necessary”, he tells me, “because it emphasises our humanity; it brings us back in difficult times to who we are—human beings who create art, culture and civilisation. Art is about the insistence of life.” Even when everything seems hopeless, as it does in Gaza at this moment.

Masoud knows this better and more acutely than most of us. Less than a week before we speak, his sister-in-law, the widow of his brother who was killed in Gaza in December 2023, was killed in an Israeli operation on Jabalia along with one of her children. But still Masoud is making art. “It feels more needed than ever. I need to do this play. What matters right now is that the people of Gaza are not forgotten.”

Ahmed Masoud's bother and his family.

In 2018 Masoud wrote a short story, Application 39, for an anthology in which Palestinian writers imagined the future. A black comedy, the story conjured a Gaza flattened by genocide in 2025. “Unfortunately”, says Masoud wryly, “I thought what I was writing was extreme, but it turned out to be prophetic.” Masoud imagined a Gaza divided into smaller states or municipalities and run by robots and drones. Then in a bizarre twist, the Gazan municipality gets chosen to host the 2048 Olympic Games. It is exactly the sort of thing that Donald Trump might applaud given his desire to turn Gaza into a luxury resort, but Masoud’s satire got there first.

Now Masoud, who is probably best known by UK theatregoers for the brutal and moving comedy The Shroud Maker, has transposed his own story to the stage. Application 39 (for the Gaza 2048 Summer Olympics), which opens at Theatro Technis next week, alongside performances of Return to Palestine from the celebrated West Bank Freedom Theatre and Irish/Palestinian comic Sami Abu Wardeh, as part of the PalArt and Shubbak 2025 festivals, gives Palestinian voices a space. Something that many mainstream British theatres have singularly failed to do. It wasn’t an easy task. “There is a difference between writing an imagined genocide and turning the story into a play when people are living through one. I have cried writing this play.”

Ahmed and his brothers in Jabalia in Gaza.

In Application 39, his sister-in-law’s voice lives on. So too do the voices and stories of ordinary Gazans. He wanted too to honour the stories of some, like Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to leave the Jabalia hospital where he worked and, for his stand, was arrested and continues to be detained by Israel.

“Art jolts us back to reality,” argues Masoud. “ It can connect us to the human stories that the news doesn’t cover. The father looking for his missing child, the mother saying goodbye to her children, the street corner, the library, and the café are now all destroyed. Art offers a record of lives lived.” In effect, a historical record of what may not be recorded in the data, which can often be distorted by propaganda.

“Theatre is a human footprint. Another kind of historical record. One that people in the future can look at to find out what happened.”

The show poster for Application 39.

In the current circumstances and the face of so much loss, it would be easy for Masoud, who has lived in the UK since 2002 but, prior to the current conflict, regularly visited his family in Gaza and had dreams of opening a theatre in Jabalia, to give into despair. But he has not, even if hope is in short supply and he worries that hope can be “deceiving, because it keeps you going, but at the same time it makes you accept the status quo.”

But like much of Masoud’s work, Application 39 is grounded in the reality of Gaza, its comedy, tragedy and its history, but also tries to imagine how things could and might be better.

“In the end change will come when people come together to stop what is happening. My hope is that in the end the Israelis and the Palestinians will realise that they can’t get rid of each other. Every war has been the war to end all wars, and it never is. I’m hoping that just as the genocide part of Application 39 turned out to be prophetic, I’m hoping too that its move towards resolution turns out to be prophetic and that people really will come together and say, ‘enough is enough.’”

Cover photo of Ahmed Masoud. Application 39 will play at the Theatro Technis from 26 - 29 May and 31 May - 1 June. Book your tickets now.