The play, which starts a tour of British cities in February, is a devastating look at the genocide in Gaza from the perspective of a Palestinian child. Eleven-year-old Renad – stunningly portrayed by Irish-Palestinian actor Sarah Agha – is searching through the rubble of her destroyed home in Jabalia refugee camp for her brother, mother, father, and beloved story-telling grandmother. She can’t find them, and is then overjoyed to discover another survivor – her classmate Layan, who she could not stand in school.

After Layan tells her that reports say that Israel will bomb every home in the north of Gaza, Renad decides to go south. She walks for days, eating little food and hardly sleeping. As she walks, she describes the devastation, and comforts herself by recounting some of her grandmother’s stories from Palestinian folklore, including the story of the phoenix and the story of the fart.

Gaza’s children

Renad’s narrative and the folk tales are interspersed with poems by Gaza children, from the collection A Million Kites. These poems, and Renad’s recollection of trips to the beach, cooking and braiding her hair remind us that every one of these children – the uncounted orphans, the maimed and disabled as well as the 20,000 dead – were living, loving, and carefree children whose lives have been ruthlessly terminated or destroyed by Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.

The play ends with a devastating projection of a partial list of names of the murdered children. As the shot pans further and further back, the seemingly endless list continues to fill the screen. This image was reinforced in the performance at London’s Arcola Theatre by a display of some of the quilts from the Each Child a Light project, which also attempts to memorialise these children.

In the discussion following the performance in the Arcola, actor Sarah Agha paid special tribute to the theatre for hosting this play, and other Palestinian works. At a time of increasing repression of speech and action in support of Palestinian rights, venues across the country are facing pressure to cancel events, and too few are prepared to resist this censorship.

If this play comes to your town, make every effort to see it. If it is not scheduled to come, try to persuade a local theatre or community centre to host it.

And above all, remember that one death is a tragedy. Twenty thousand deaths is not just “a statistic”, but twenty thousand individual tragedies.