Dear Laila, you are five now and have started to ask me where I grew up, and why we can’t go there. This is me trying to give you an answer.
The seeds of Dear Laila were planted when Basel’s five-year-old daughter began to ask him about his home growing up. Unable to take her there, he decided he would try to bring the place to her, by creating a model of his childhood home in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.
Dear Laila shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of one family, exploring how war and exile are experienced through the everyday, the domestic, and the public space. An intimate, interactive installation experienced by one audience member at a time, Dear Laila uses the retelling of memories and tactile details to bring this now destroyed place to life.
Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and who creates art in order to face, express and understand the trauma that his community lives with.
By Basel Zaraa
Translator and script editor: Emily Churchill Zaraa
Sound engineer: Pete Churchill
Commissioned by Good Chance Theatre, with support from Arts Council England
Dates and times:
6th and 7th of September 2025, between 2pm and 9pm daily,
8th – 10th of September 2025, between 5pm and 9pm daily,
The installation can be visited by one person per time slot. Slots are in every 20 minutes.
Please arrive at least 10 minutes before the start of the event.
Duration: 15 minutes
Venue: we will send the information on the location by email after your ticket purchase
Language: available in the languages: Hungarian, English, Arabic, French, Italian or German
Accessibility:
The venue is not wheelchair accessible, but our staff will assist visitors with limited mobility (not wheelchair users) in navigating the venue.
Ticketed program.
The slots start in every 20 minutes, but tickets can be purchased for one-hour timeframe. The exact starting time will be send to you by email after you purchase your ticket.
Ticket prices:
Normal ticket: 1900 HUF
Discount ticket: 1400 HUF
Supporters ticket: 4000 HUF