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A young woman stands outside a door, rehearsing a version of herself she hopes will be enough. Inside, her father sits by a window, waiting for a sunrise he describes to anyone who will listen. Between them: a language neither fully shares, a country neither fully remembers, and a box neither can open without the other.

“Fragments” is a bold, multilingual performance about identity, memory, and what we inherit from people who were already broken when they had us. It is theatre that refuses to sit still colliding Arabic, English and Darija, live music, projected image, and physical movement into a single restless form that mirrors its subject: a self that has never been allowed to be just one thing.

Mai has spent her whole life between. Between cultures, between languages, between versions of herself that never quite fit the room she is standing in. Egyptian and Moroccan by blood, European by upbringing, she carries stories she was never fully told about places she has never seen. When a legal notice threatens to erase her right to remain in the country she has always called home, she is forced toward the one person she has spent years carefully avoiding: her father, Gamal, a man whose memory is as selective as it is devastating, and whose past keeps arriving, loud and uninvited, into the present.

Gamal is not an easy man to love. He is funny, infuriating, tender and cruel. He carries a box he cannot open and a song he cannot name. Somewhere inside him lives a version of himself Mai has never met, younger, fearless, standing in the fire of A square, feeling, for the first time in his life, completely at home. That moment made him. The years after unmade him quietly.

That is the cruel inheritance at the heart of this piece. A father who found belonging in a history did not protect. A daughter, born into the aftermath, left to prove she belongs somewhere, anywhere, with paperwork, appeals, and visits to a care home she is not sure she has the right to make.

“Fragments” does not move in straight lines. It moves the way memory does. Across a European care home, the tear-gas streets of Cairo, and a Moroccan courtyard under French colonial rule, without permission, without warning, and with devastating precision. Languages bleed into each other and collapse. Projected images fracture and repeat. Bodies fall and rise and fall again. A mysterious figure in a deer mask moves through every scene writing resistance onto walls, running without destination, refusing to be caught. A live musician pulls melodies across every border the characters cannot cross.

This is a story about the gap between where we come from and where we land. About the memory that prove we were ever here at all. About a girl who looks in the mirror and sees the wrong version. And about what it takes, generation after generation, to keep writing your name on the wall.

Fierce, restless, impossible to ignore.

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Cast & crew:

Kenza Fergag, Mazen Al Kareem, Hamdi Hjira, Soukaina Fawzi, Khaled Albahnasi

&

Bayan Belhadi, Nathan Charles, Radwa Elkassas, Saif Bassem, Mohamed Kasban

Producer: Peter Barlow, Benedict Ayrton, Kit Lessner

Co-producer: Mohamed Kasban, Kenza Fergag, Nathan Charles