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Sara Masry – An Actor on a Journey

I’ve enjoyed my time with Contemporancient Theatre immensely since first meeting and working with the company in the summer of 2023 on Sanctuary: The Secrets of the Gunter Mansion. I felt so welcomed by the team. Getting to know them and learning more about Wales and Welsh culture during that month spent in Abergavenny felt like a big warm cwtch. I also enjoyed sharing elements of my own cultures with my new Welsh family (I am part Saudi, Palestinian and Yemeni), be it
through food, music or words. CT’s Musical Director Steve Preston has been
learning Arabic on and off, and went further to try his hand at making an intricate traditional dessert from the Arab world that even I haven’t ever attempted.
Later that same year I went to see the team perform another play, The Price of Change, at Blaengarw Workmen’s Hall. It was October 7 th . Since then, my life has turned upside down. It’s been exactly two years since Israel’s assault on Gaza commenced, and every day has contained ever more horror. Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and there has been increasing violence and ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces in the West Bank, where my remaining family there is based. My 16-year-old cousin, Mohammed, was fatally shot in the head by Israeli occupying forces while standing outside of a pharmacy – caught in the ‘crossfire’ as soldiers shot at an alleged assailant from their armoured military vehicle. No investigation, no accountability – just an only son snatched from his parents, whose lives have been
utterly shattered. I’ve watched friends in Gaza literally deteriorate in real time as they struggle to find food. I’ve felt guilt every day that I can’t do more to help them, whatever I manage to do – whether through fundraising or advocacy – feeling like a pittance compared to what they face. It feels immeasurably worse that I am watching
this nightmare from the safety of my life here in the UK, the government of which is both historically responsible for creating the conditions for the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948 and ongoing destruction and ethnic cleansing of its remaining society; as well as being complicit in currently arming Israel and unconditionally shielding it from accountability, despite the UN finally recognising that it is committing genocide.
Israeli forces have destroyed over 21 cultural centres in Gaza, most of these
theatres. Through indiscriminate carpet bombing, they have murdered thousands upon thousands of artists, actors, playwrights, filmmakers, dreamers. People like Mahasen al-Khateeb, one of Gaza’s most influential digital artists. She was killed in October 2024 when Israel struck a building in Jabalia refugee camp where she was sheltering with her family. Her murder came a mere few hours after she published her final illustration to her Instagram account, in which she paid tribute to Sha’ban al- Dalou, himself a 19-year-old software engineering student who burned to death
alongside his mother at al-Aqsa Hospital, still attached to his IV drip, after an Israeli airstrike on the hospital grounds.
I am currently featuring in CT’s For the Love of Merthyr, an inspirational play which explores post-war Merthyr Tydfil and the early days of the NHS. I play the role of Mira, a nurse from Yemen working in the newly-formed National Health Service.
Playing the role of a medical professional, what cannot escape me is the thought of how, since October 2023, Israel has murdered over 1,500 health and humanitarian workers – supposedly a protected category under international law during armed conflict. These are not just numbers, not statistics, but lives and entire universes.
Just a few days ago, Israel killed Abed El Hameed, a staff member of Médecins

Sans Frontières (MSF). He and colleagues were hit by an airstrike while waiting to board a bus to go to work at their field hospital while wearing MSF vests and clearly
identified as medical humanitarian workers. El Hameed is the 15th MSF worker to be killed by Israel since the start of its onslaught. He was the “driving force” behind opening up the 3D physiotherapy department in Gaza, and helped create custom compression suits for burns patients, chiefly concerned with helping restore patients’ hope and sense of dignity. Israel commits war crime after war crime and has yet to face a shred of accountability. What allows this to continue is not only the complicity of its allied governments, but our silence.
As part of my advocacy, I work with the White Kite Collective, a grassroots group of arts and culture workers that host fundraising events sharing testimony, poetry and music from Gazans and Palestinians. Art and artists have, throughout the ages, been agents of social change. Art can not only change lives through impactful storytelling and portraying underrepresented narratives, but also through serving as a medium to speak out against injustice and oppression, and to stand with those in need.
It is more important than ever to show solidarity with Palestinians in their greatest hour of need. UN-linked reports are emerging that the death toll (direct and indirect) resulting from Israel’s genocide is likely 680,000 – mostly women and children.
Soon, there will be no one in Gaza left to save. We will be left only with the rubble, and our regret for not having done more.
If you have been moved by any of the above, you can show your solidarity in both words and in action. There are many grassroots charities and fundraisers on the ground in Gaza that are in dire need of funds. If you’re unsure where to look, please feel free to contact me for guidance. Follow the work of White Kite Collective or Culture Workers Against Genocide, another brilliant group of artists and culture workers that challenge complicit funding structures in arts institutions across the UK.
And finally: your voice. Write to your MP. Organise or attend a solidarity event. Consider boycotting organisations complicit in the occupation and apartheid. There is so much more we can all be doing. The more of us speak up for Palestine, the
sooner we can collectively bring this horror to an end. And the sooner Palestinians
will finally see justice after 77 long and brutal years.

Sara Masry -Oct 2025

New Company Directors join Contemporancient Theatre

We are thrilled to be able to announce that Stephen J Preston has formally joined the company as a Director and will be our MD, Composer, Musician and Actor as we go forward. There are lots of details about Steve’s varied and impressive career on the website under the ‘Meet The Team’ section – so you can find out all about what he’s done and is doing right there. Steve is acting in our forthcoming musical farce about a family of Welsh Elvis Presley tribute acts as well as being MD, and musician and singer for the show. Steve is composing new work for our piece about Richard Price and will be involved in composition for our work linked to religious and political refugees in Abergavenny which we are just beginning to plan.

We also welcome the wonderful Neil Maidman as Company Director, Theatre and Technical Director, Dramaturg and Actor for the company. Several of us have worked with and known Neil for many years – again, you’ll find a summary of his career on our ‘Meet The Team’ page. Neil has a huge wealth of experience in all aspects of theatre and we are very fortunate to have him bring all that expertise and experience to Contemporancient Theatre. Neil joins us with the Elvis work well under way and will support us in bringing his directorial eye to the piece as well as helping us as Technical Director, as we bring the work to stages around South Wales.

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We’ve been very frustrated as a new company over the last eighteen months – just like anyone else in theatre, pretty much all around the world. We have ideas, projects, and performances that we are longing to bringing to the stage and to audiences but that just hasn’t been possible.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that we have been idle. We have three projects in various states of development. The first is the ‘Price Project’ – for this we have a completed script and a cast in place. We have a collection of new poetry written and a score in the process of composition. This project is for performance in 2023, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Price. The plan is to perform in the Garw Valley initially and then to take the play elsewhere in Wales and hopefully, abroad.

The second project is a very different one indeed – looking at the more contemporary side of our mission and work – the starting point for this comedy was annual The Elvis Festival at Porthcawl – a huge event which we wanted to celebrate. This is a riotous, musical farce about a family of Welsh Elvis tribute performers. This play is in the latter stages of rehearsal and will tour venues across South Wales as soon as the pandemic conditions allow. We hope to perform the play at The Elvis Festival in Porthcawl in September 2022, also.

The third project, which is really at its inception, is a play looking at the lives of those who as a result of their beliefs, are forced to take refuge. We are focusing on ‘The Gunter House’ in Abergavenny, a place where, in the seventeenth century, Catholic priests took refuge, hiding in priest holes and in a secret chapel hidden amongst its walls. This will lead us to look at those who have travelled across the world to seek refuge in modern day Abergavenny – again in fear of their lives.