Review: Ha, Fringe 2025

I don’t believe anything could have quite prepared me for the disturbing, evocative, powerful experience that is Ha. There wasn’t a big audience for this show (maybe six or seven of us), and I was about to find out why.

Vibe

You enter into a very dark theatre, stumbling to find your way to a seat. You sit down. You see in the darkness there’s a woman in front of you, sat in a chair. You get the idea she’s almost naked, but it’s really hard to see. You can’t see her face – unless you get your camera out and it adjusts the light for you (as shown in the the image above).

She’s sitting there with her mouth wide open, in an almost horrific fashion. I got a bit of a shock. She sits like that, unmoving, in silence, for a while. And then she starts to breathe deeply, becoming louder as we start to see a little more light.

The show itself

The show has started. You start to wish it hadn’t. The performer, Anano Makharadze, continues to sit with her mouth wide agape, and the breaths become louder and anguished. Like a person in pain/horror struggling in shock, maybe a last breath.

We learn she is the voice of the dead, cast upon the dry shores by the sea. We hear the tales, the pain, the fear, the anger. The anguished gasps of deep breaths keep coming throughout.

Confronted by death, horror, human suffering, and bubbling vengeance; bubbling until it takes over, all in this powerful one-woman performance. At one point during the monologue, especially about the children – the one killed before they could speak their first words and saw their brother thrown into the air – I started to tear up.

The show is 30 minutes – any longer and it probably would have been too much for any audience to take. It’s taken me a few hours to properly process and figure out what to say about it, and it’s all too relevant to current events happening in Gaza right now (which is definitely not a war – it’s something else. And that something else is genocide).

If Ha is to take people out of their comfort zones, and remind them of what’s going on in the world right now, it certainly does that – but I’m the wrong audience. I’m already there. But I admit the guilt of going back to my comfy life all the same, watching from behind a screen.

Overall

This is a deeply disturbing, thought-provoking, brave performance by Anano Makharadze, who commits 100% to being the voice of the dead. There are tears, haunting breaths, angry shouts, fearful mumblings and cries, and chanting. The whole thing is a bit of a wake up slap to the face.

I like anything that provokes a reaction out of me, and this did. It’s deeply uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t want to experience it again, but equally, I think it’s an important piece of contemporary performance art.