BÉZNĂ Theatre Brings Gaza Media Critique to New Diorama

BÉZNĂ theatre's The First Year (of the Gaza Genocide in the Media) runs at London's New Diorama theatre as a 90-minute interrogation of how the western press covered the first year of the Israel-Gaza war.

The British-Romanian collective builds the production on testimonies from Gaza. It asks how news outlets cover a war in a region where independent foreign journalists are blocked from entry, and what to make of western press reports set against the livestreamed footage appearing on our phones.

The show's questions circle Israel's actions in Gaza, which followed Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023 and, as the production frames it, brought apocalyptic brutality and mounting death tolls. BÉZNĂ poses these questions through what the Guardian's review describes as "a polyphony of satire, song, graphics, snatches of history, absurdism and sincerity".

A four-strong cast carries the material. Maryam Abu Khaled, Sara Masry, Luca Kamleh Chapman and Sofia juggle mini lectures, dramatised dialogue, poetic monologues and meta theatre across the production's 90 minutes.

The Guardian's review is mixed in its verdict. It calls the production "passionate" and praises its grounding in testimonies from Gaza, but finds that it "poses many questions regarding Israel's actions" while ultimately getting "overwhelmed by fact-delivery and form-switches".

The review's three-star-adjacent framing identifies the central tension: the production's ambition to say everything at once. Mini lectures sit beside absurdism; songs interrupt poetic monologues; meta-theatrical devices break the dramatised dialogues. For the critic, this accumulation of forms dilutes rather than amplifies the testimonies at the show's core.

The piece arrives at a moment of continuing debate over journalistic access to Gaza. With independent foreign reporters barred from entry, coverage has depended on Palestinian journalists on the ground, official statements and verified social media footage — precisely the gap in representation that BÉZNĂ's production interrogates.

The company, founded by British-Romanian makers, has built its reputation on politically charged documentary theatre, and this work extends that practice to the media sphere itself: not just what happened in Gaza, but how it was framed, filtered and received in the west during the war's first year.

As the war's coverage continues to be contested, The First Year offers theatre as a space for that argument — even if, according to the Guardian, its reach at times exceeds its formal grasp.