There were calls to cancel this show after Bondi. Now it’s back

When Khalid Abdalla was in Australia for the Sydney Festival in January, there were calls to drop his one-man show Nowhere from the program.

It was, the Scottish-born Anglo-Egyptian actor and Palestinian rights activist admits, “a very charged time, just weeks after Bondi” – the attack in December on a Jewish gathering at Sydney’s famed beach, which left 15people dead, along with one of the two gunmen.

The calls also came amid a furore over the decision to ditch Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers’ Week. It was, says Abdalla, “the only time in my career so far there were attempts to de-platform or cancel me”.

The Sydney Festival held its nerve, and Abdalla, best known for playing Dodi Fayed in season six of The Crown, got to perform the intensely personal and political work he now brings to Melbourne for Rising.

Nowhere is a complex piece that melds voice, movement and video to probe the notion of Arab identity, of belonging and of statelessness, in the modern world. A linchpin in the show is the observation of former British prime minister Theresa May, that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”.

Colonialism is squarely in the spotlight here: while the Middle East is often seen as the great risk to global stability, Nowhere insists the post-World War I carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France is a root cause.

“There is an attempt to reconcile with colonial histories, and that creates a very resonant ground for the show that is unlike anywhere else, really,” he says.

“Here, I literally walk on stage following a Welcome to Country, and it’s Reconciliation Week, and you walk into the theatre to a sign that talks about unceded territory. That’s a very different frequency to the idea of what ‘normal’ means [in the UK].”

Nowhere is an evolving work, as Abdalla continually tweaks it in response to developments in the real world. But he says the version he’s performing in Melbourne is much the same as the one he did in Sydney at the start of the year.

“[Lebanon] is there without me having to say it, as is Iran,” he says. “It’s always shifting with the circumstances. Here I’m performing in the context of the royal commission [into antisemitism], I’m performing in the context of what just happened with the flotilla [of activists detained and allegedly abused by Israel]. In rewriting it, I’ve always understood it has to have some rage in it, which then settles in a more hopeful space.”

Abdalla doesn’t consider himself as a citizen of nowhere, but rather as a product of tw