A new work of political theatre by Dr Brian Brivati
A provocative play about genocide, memory, responsibility and the limits of witnessing.
In a purgatorial railway waiting room, theatrical versions of Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski become conductors for history’s “difficult cases”: victims, perpetrators, survivors and witnesses who refuse to fit neatly into the categories assigned to them.
Where do the tracks of political violence lead?
The waiting room transforms around its characters: first into the King David Hotel, then a Palestinian home, a refugee camp, a checkpoint, a hospital and the ruins of Gaza. Ordinary objects—a key, wedding cloth, unfinished letters, damaged notebooks and broken bowls—resist the administrative language of targets, security zones, collateral damage and reconstruction.
Moving between dark humour, historical testimony and moral argument, the play examines the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation, displacement and the destruction of Gaza without claiming that these histories are identical. It asks how catastrophe is remembered, how inherited trauma is converted into forever wars, and how bureaucracy can conceal responsibility.
Book of the Month · This Week in Palestine
Critical praise for The Waiting Room
“The Waiting Room is a formidable work of historical imagination and moral reckoning, treating the stage as judgement, not illustration.”
— Tawfiq Al-Ghussein, This Week in Palestine, Issue 337, August 2026
Al-Ghussein praises the play’s refusal of moral simplification, its railway metaphor and its use of theatrical image rather than exposition. He describes a work that is intellectually serious, uncompromising and humane, and argues that its questions demand performance and shared public encounter.
Who will stop the next train?
Inside the book
History
The King David Hotel bombing, the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation and Gaza.
Witnessing
Who controls the stories of the dead, and what happens to lives that resist simple categories?
Responsibility
How ordinary decisions, official language and inherited trauma lay the tracks toward catastrophe.
Book details
| Author | Dr Brian Brivati |
| Publisher | The Charlwood Review Books |
| Publication | 23 July 2026 |
| Length | 168 pages |
| ISBN | 978-1919341774 |
About the author
Brian Brivati
Brian Brivati is a historian, writer and human-rights practitioner. Following a twenty-year academic career at the Institute of Contemporary British History and Kingston University, where he taught contemporary history, human rights and life writing, he went on to lead and advise organisations working in conflict, democratic transition and international policy.
The Charlwood Review Books 