Milk: Spectacle is tinged with tragedy in the Abbey’s Palestinian dance play

Milk

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

★★★☆☆

In an era of ceaseless reports from a horrifying conflict, when a nation is voicing its grief, how can an audience – no less than a society – be made to take notice?

The dance play Milk, by the Haifa-based Palestinian company Khashabi, uses the tools of contemporary theatre to portray despair in new ways. Here, a group of mothers surviving disaster are seen in an abstract wasteland, their shuddering bodies carrying a mannequin, rocking and shushing it as if it were a child, until collapsing into Pietà-style poses.

Bashar Murkus, its director, has previously found arch methods to address violence, pairing a prisoner with an executioner as an absurdist double act in New Middle East, from 2013, and transmuting the tragedy of child refugees drowned at sea into the underwater nightmare of The Salty Road, from 2019.

In Milk – which premiered in 2022, since when it has gained extra resonance – he seeks out the splashy spectacle of Pina Bausch’s water dances, though tinged with tragedy: in Majdala Khoury’s extraordinary scenography, the Abbey stage becomes a pool of grieving mothers’ breast milk.

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Murkus depicts complex navigations of grief through considered movement sequences. In the eclipsing sadness of one scene, a woman (a superb Salwa Nakkara) fussily rearranges a group portrait to try to include the mannequins, but the final composition blocks the women from view.

Two young mothers (Samaa Wakim and Shaden Kanboura, both nimble) are paired with lifeless partners in repeated combinations, in a throwback to Bausch’s 1978 masterpiece Café Müller.

Later, solace is suggested by the sight of inanimate bodies lying among pretty flowers while the women finally erupt with happiness, making each other laugh at a picnic.

Murkus, assisted by the dramaturge Khulood Basel (a regular and essential collaborator), has an eye for references. When the cast are assembled into a still pose, surrounding a mother holding her lifeless son (Reem Talhami, giving a picture of devastation), it seems in re-creation of Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ. (Speaking of chiaroscuro, check out the accomplishment of Muaz Al Jubeh’s incredible lighting).

That combination of splashing movement and religious art evokes the Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou and boundary-pushing work usually presented at the prestigious Avignon Festival, in France, rather than at our own national theatre. (Abbey, please stage this kind of production more often.)

In the second half Murkus introduces a son grieving the loss of his mother (Eddie Dow, whose movement dazzles with the spray of the wet stage), making for a complex sequence of mourners craving affection, resentful of others’ happiness and, ultimately, incapable of replacing what they’ve lost.

The drama isn’t quite sustained through the lengthy assembly of Milk’s elaborate stage images, or in insistently repeated movements that struggle to acquire variation. Maybe that’s because no one knows where this will all end.

Those who saw Milk when it premiered must look back on the final image of bodies among rubble as ominously prophetic. If it can’t quite find a way out, that’s perhaps because the real-life horror it portrays continues.

Milk is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 1st