Domestic Activism & Cogs that Refuse to Turn: An Intro to Hannah Khalil’s Blood Fruit
by ReOrient Publications Dramaturg Emily DeDakis
As a dramaturgy team member of the fourth partnership between Golden Thread Productions and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), ReOrient Publications Dramaturg Emily DeDakis contemplates the power of strikes and boycotts while conjuring Henry Street in Dublin — site of Hannah Khalil’s compact, rhythmic masterpiece of a play in ReOrient 2026.
ABOUT EMILY DeDAKIS
Emily DeDakis (she/her) is a writer and dramaturg from the Southeast U.S. now living in Belfast, Ireland. As a dramaturg, she has developed dozens of scripts and performances in her native and adopted homes, including immersive, 24-hour, ensemble/devised, multimedia, verbatim, and dance theatre. Emily writes for theatre, sound art, radio, TV, and contemporary music, and performs voice/text with HIVE Choir and No Hevdem.
Hannah Khalil’s play Blood Fruit takes place on Henry Street, a pedestrianized thoroughfare in the heart of Dublin that’s crammed with life: buskers and street performers, people criss-crossing on foot or bicycle, wee shops, flagship department stores — and then there are the icons…. On the corner of Henry and O’Connell Streets is the General Post Office, epicenter of the 1916 Easter Rising, where rebels against the British monarchy proclaimed a new Irish republic (even before their cause was a popular one in Ireland). Blood Fruit is dedicated to one of the street’s more subtle icons: the branch of Dunnes department store where in 1984 a young grocery cashier called Mary Manning refused to ring up two grapefruits imported from the Apartheid state of South Africa. Citrus fruit in the hand of an Irish woman launched a trade union strike that led to the first total boycott of South African goods by any Western nation. It’s a familiar story around Ireland (a partner’s uncle worked at Dunnes Stores back then, so I’d heard a secondhand tidbit of the lore already) but it’s not well known further afield. And with all the urgent conversation about boycotts right now, Khalil wants everyone to know about the Grapefruit Ladies.
I always feel lucky talking to Hannah Khalil. The way she speaks theatre, frames, and explores it in conversation, is fiercely intriguing and deeply satisfying. Khalil is an accomplished Palestinian-Irish playwright brought up in Dubai and based in London. Her 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad marked the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first mainstage production by a woman writer of Arab descent. She’s a familiar voice and an Affiliated Artist at Golden Thread, who produced her Scenes from 71* Years in their 2019 season, and her short piece The Rehearsal in ReOrient 2017.
Both of Khalil’s parents emigrated to London when they were teenagers, and the story and contextual framing of Blood Fruit link her mother’s Irish and father’s Palestinian roots. “It’s a story that I heard in Ireland, I don’t even remember when I first heard it,” Khalil says. “But it always stayed with me: that young women could do something that could make such a difference. I’m signed up to the boycott of Israel as the only peaceful method within my grasp of feeling like I’m doing something — well, other than writing plays, obviously. I’m told often by people, ‘no, boycott doesn’t work.’ So I wanted to write something about Mary Manning as a sort of corrective to this idea that boycott shuts down conversation, that boycott is not a positive thing, and that individuals can’t do anything.”
The Dunnes Stores strikers were mostly young women ages 17 to 24, two were single mothers. Khalil describes their determination despite facing indifference, misogyny, and derision: “It took a long time for people to take them seriously. They were totally vilified, called work-shy and lazy. It was years that they were on strike, and a really long time before anyone else joined them.” When the strike was about five months old, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu asked to meet them at Heathrow Airport on his way to receive his prize, pointing to their action as a critical piece of the anti-Apartheid puzzle. Only then “people began to take them seriously,” Khalil says. She calls their strike “just such an act of courage and solidarity, and it’s so hopeful.”
Blood Fruit has a rhythmic underscore with a vocal chorus, a kind of mechanical soundscape grooving through it that seems to function as a work song of sorts. “The director [Wynne Chan] was also asking me about music,” Khalil says, “and I never imagined it as music at all. It’s the mechanics of the machine that we’re supposed to fit inside, and Mary Manning doesn’t; she’s the cog that refused to turn.”
Even when the characters in Blood Fruit are standing their ground, they recognize the tension they’re creating. Khalil’s play travels through the intersection between misogyny and apology, as she has had to do in her own life. “I’m very aware that women of my generation were told, ‘Be quiet, behave well, be a good girl, and people will notice and you’ll be rewarded.’ I applied that approach to my playwriting during my twenties and thirties,” Khalil says. But then, “I realized I had to speak up for myself, for my work, I had to put myself in front of people, I had to represent myself and the things I wanted to talk about, and then things started to change. The narrative we’ve been told is just b.s., to keep us quiet.”
It turns out you may have to be a noisy cog to make the kind of theatre you want to make. “The problem is,” Khalil says, “every time there’s a cog that turns the wrong way, the big hand comes and fixes it, or moves it, or removes it. And I think we’re in a moment now where a lot of the disruptive work is happening outside of traditional spaces. ReOrient and Golden Thread are an exception, and making really brave and exciting work that speaks to the important things happening in the world now. But that’s not what I’m seeing everywhere.”
Employment instability is a very real cost, whether you’re a cashier in 1984 or a playwright in 2026. Since Arts Council England’s 2024 warning statement that artists and organizations may lose their funding if they create ‘overtly political or activist statements,’ Khalil admits, “to get commissioned to write plays about Palestine is very tricky. I spend a lot of time trying to think of ways I can Trojan-horse that story, and this is the perfect example — because never once in Blood Fruit is Palestine mentioned, but….” Spoiler alert: Hannah Khalil is talking about Palestine. “I don’t want there to be any signifiers of Palestine in the production, like no keffiyehs. It doesn’t need signaling. I love suggestion and subtlety [in my work]. Sometimes too much, and people don’t get it,” she says, laughing.
What I get from this brief, quickfire play is the exhilarating tang of pure possibility: The patterns we unthinkingly accept can be disrupted. It’s fuel for tallying the cost of being a noisy cog and choosing to be one anyway. The tactility and simplicity of this play is something I needed, here and now. I’m eating a grapefruit while I finish writing this, trying to remember where it originated (almost definitely elsewhere). I’m reading produce labels and scanning barcodes with a boycott app before I bring my shopping to the tills of Irish grocery stores these days. It is a tiny thing to do, and easy to feel alone and futile in it. This play is for feeling less alone, and for recognizing the potential weight and meaningful impact of these tiny things.
To continue inhabiting Hannah Khalil’s world, see Blood Fruit — and four other amazing short plays by MENA writers — at the ReOrient 2026 Festival in San Francisco (October 9–November 1).