Nadia Dawber, James El-Sharawy, Sama Rantisi and Ghantus Wael make up the company for the world premiere of Application 39, Ahmed Masoud's satire about a Gaza awarded the 2048 Olympic Games. It opens at Bristol Old Vic on 23 September before four more dates around the country.
Nadia Dawber takes the role of Lamma and James El-Sharawy plays Rayyan in Application 39, which begins its UK tour at Bristol Old Vic on 23 September. Sama Rantisi joins them as Selma and Ghantus Wael as the President. The casting was announced today by ETT (English Touring Theatre), Matthew Schmolle Productions and Stratford East.
Dawber was born in Nazareth and is of Palestinian, British and German heritage. Anyone who was in Edinburgh this summer will have had the chance to see her in a full Fringe run of Majenin: A Palestinian Love Story; her other stage work includes Antigone, Valhalla, A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. On screen she co-starred in Underground, named Best First-Time Feature at the Boden International Film Festival, and she completed filming on the feature PYRE earlier this year.
El-Sharawy arrives from Around the World in 80 Days at the Barn Theatre, and has previously appeared in Cry Havoc at the Park Theatre, The Fifth Column and The Cutting of the Cloth at Southwark Playhouse, Scattered for Theatr Clwyd and Good Chance Theatre in Calais, and Border Control at The Vaults. His screen credits take in EastEnders, Doctors and the third season of Tyrant.
Rantisi is a Palestinian actress, writer and theatre-maker based in London whose credits include Tomorrow Will Be a Palestinian Day at Theatre503 and Welcome to Gaza by Peter Oswald. She is also the creator and lead artist of QUA (Strength), an Arts Council England and Bertha Artivism Award-funded project drawn from the writings of her late father, the Palestinian journalist Samir Rantisi. Wael was born in Sakhnin in the Galilee and now lives in London; he toured internationally in The Siege for The Freedom Theatre and has worked repeatedly with Al-Kasaba Theatre, on Much Ado About Nothing, The Golden Fish and The Seagull.
The play itself is a satire on the machinery of international sport and the politics that surround it. Two young IT workers at the municipality of Gaza hack the bid process for the 2048 Olympic Games as a prank, and win it — a hundred years, as the production frames it, after the Nakba. What follows runs through occupation, bureaucracy, absurdity and reconstruction, drawing on real testimony gathered in Gaza, and asks what the territory might be if it were somewhere the world gathered rather than somewhere it watched.
Ahmed Masoud is a Palestinian and British writer, theatre maker and academic whose plays include The Shroud Maker, Camouflage, Passports, Mo Salah and Jinn and Other Complicated Things, and who has published the novels Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda and Come What May. He founded the Al Zaytouna Dance Company and the PalArt Collective. Cressida Brown directs; her productions include The Political History of Smack and Crack, England & Son on tour, Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Arts at the Arcola Theatre and Twelfth Night for the RSC and the Guangzhou Dramatic Arts Centre.
Charlotte Espiner designs set and costume, with lighting by Imogen Clarke, sound by Ed Lewis and music by Sami El-Anany. The press performance is on Thursday 24 September 2026 at Bristol Old Vic.
The tour dates in full:
- 23-26 September: Bristol Old Vic, Bristol
- 30 September - 1 October: Northern Stage, Newcastle
- 6-7 October: New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich
- 9-10 October: Aviva Studios (Factory International), Manchester
- 13-14 October: Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
