Programming a huge festival such as the Fringe can be a hardship, especially when a show is placed in a slot where its demands on the audience are harder to meet. Fadi Murad’s one-man show Come Back Home, despite its straightforward title, feels particularly ill-suited to a 13:15 slot, when the audience may not be at their most alert and ready to navigate its fragmented structure.

The central concept of Come Back Home is in its name: it is a show about what home means. Murad begins with a series of Fabis, an autobiographical character he plays himself, apparently wetting themselves and pointing at one another like the three Spider-Men in the famous meme, before the show falls into fragments. Murad weaves video recordings of a live musical performance, archival footage of himself singing ‘Mad World’ by Tears for Fears when he was young, and poetry about water into memories of his mother, who died when he was young.

His show feels simple and straightforward yet obscure at the same time. You can always tie pieces of the show back to its title, home, his relationship with death, and his relationship with the land of Palestine. Yet it is hard to work out the relationship between the different elements, or how he has choreographed each individual element within the structure of the show, and one can easily get lost in this labyrinth of metaphors and different forms of media.

Of course, not everything needs to be understood logically. But the fragmentation of the show also makes its internal logic difficult to follow, and with its overloaded symbolism and metaphorical monologue, it can also be hard to connect with Murad on an emotional level.

Come Back Home has finished its run