Unimaginable Future? Spectatorship and Metatheatre in
Ibrahim’s Two Palestinians Go Dogging (2022)

Abstract: This paper examines Sami Ibrahim’s play two Palestinians go dogging (2022) through the intersecting lenses of political dramaturgy and metatheatre, arguing that the play’s formal strategies constitute a coherent politics of spectatorship that refuses both passive consumption and redemptive resolution. Drawing on Liz Tomlin’s framework of political dramaturgies, the paper contends that Ibrahim constructs a metatheatrical apparatus that simultaneously demands and frustrates audience engagement, which positions the spectator not as witnesses to Palestinian suffering but as co-conspirators in its commodification. The play’s dystopian setting is read through Maurice Ebileeni’s theorization of Palestinian speculative fiction’s “Sisyphean present,” in which temporal stasis enacts the structural impossibility of imagining an alternative future under the ongoing colonial violence. The paper further argues that Ibrahim’s deployment of postdramatic theatrical conventions, as theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann and mediated through Tomlin’s politics of perception, transforms the stage into a place of ethical unsettlement: spectators are denied the consolation of moral clarity and are instead made part in the very mechanisms though which Palestinian trauma is rendered visible and then forgotten.