UK play immortalises Gaza’s slain children

The stage lights lift to reveal a young child from Gaza, aloof and tricksy, swallowed by darkness. Theatregoers have assembled at Arcola theatre to see A Grain of Sand — a stand-out one-woman play delivering a bird-eye view of children’s experience of genocide. First commissioned by the London Palestine film festival in 2024, the play is directed by Elias Matar and gracefully executed by Irish-Palestinian actress Sarah Agha.

Agha, playing Renad, wears the brightest smile, dungarees, and two tidy braids. She is  perched on a mound of sand, not pale or quartz, but muddy and sullied. She gazes tenderly at Gaza’s shoreline while Israeli fighter jets overhead hum and drum.

Gaza immortalised on stage

The young child was 11 years-old when she was killed by Israel, following its 2023 military assault on Gaza. Her spirit and testimony, one of many in the play, endures through Agha. The play’s message is clear, that no child will be expunged from the historical record – not like the countless lives disappearing from Palestine’s civil registry. Renad’s “verbatim testimony” is one of 18 collected experiences. Agha tells the Canary that these stories were taken from an anthology of poems and testimonies written by Gazan kids — A Million Kites. They form the backbone of the screenplay produced by Good Chance Theatre.

In Agha’s words, the show “immortalises” the hundreds and thousands of children Israeli occupation forces have killed. These deaths are no lapse in international conventions — they’re deliberate. The play conveys this without thrusting upon viewers the gore and depravity clogging our newsfeeds which – while educating the world of Israel’s crimes – also inures us to suffering. Instead, it invites you into the lives and children’s fantasy-prone imagination.

Daisy testimonies

Like a matryoshka doll, Agha pulls out story after story, each nested within each other. But where one story ends and another begins isn’t always clear. Their tales, memories, and fantasies are relayed with tact, levity, and acerbity, despite the difficulty, Agha explains, of being an adult actor playing a child and the “added complexity of it being a child from Gaza”.

The interlaced stories evoke emotions and sensorial experiences of life in Gaza, through a child’s eyes —  the aroma of Ouzi rice as it simmers, screeching missiles, shells whistling, chairs falling, drones hissing, and the cacophony of shrieking children, and the haunting silences in between.

As a survivor of war, I’m reminded of my Iraqi father’s words: “you hated the sound of F-16s, you wept inconsolably.” Children, as I’m painfully reminded by those in the play, are rarely handed the mic to speak — their voices muffled beneath the toll of war.

Hell with the lid off

Before Israel’s onslaught transformed Gaza into “hell with the lid off” (a term coined by James Parton), people’s ‘everyday’ wasn’t much different from yours or mine. The play delivers flashbacks to when Gaza was in better shape. Renad, seeking safety and trying to drown out the terror of her missing family, retreats into the folktales her Siti (Arabic for grandma) told, and shares these with us.

Peppered throughout the play, these folktales stand as a monument to Palestinian heritage. They braid together motifs, legends, fables, and mythical creatures. The most striking is Al-Anqaa, a firebird, synonymous with the phoenix and born from Arabic Islamic literature. It also appears as  the protagonist of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Death of Al-Anqaa,” symbolising the Palestinian experience and perseverance.

If you pay close attention to Gaza municipality’s insignia, you’ll also find the fire bird proudly at its centre.

Renad looks up at the sky, searching for a signal, and Al-Anqaa swoops in — the all-knowing, all-seeing protector of the land of Palestine. The mythical figure reflects Renad’s dissociative state, with her relationship to the sunbird shifting between dour and tongue-in-cheek.

Imagination holds a lifeline

For Gaza’s children imagination is the magic carpet that transports them to a safe space in times of genocide. Zainah, aged 13, expresses this in her cerebral poem where her imagination opens doors to unsuspecting sites of refuge – none of which reality permits.

I hid inside the paintings of artists who paint freedom…Or maybe I hid in the sea, where no one could find me…mov[ing] from one place to another, like a bottle of oil someone threw on the shore. Am I free if I become an object?

The abject helplessness her magical thinking conveys is overwhelming. For Agha, motifs and metaphors form a visual language “to help communicate something horrendous” – a coping mechanism in other words. As one child recounts:

When drones invade my brain I think of Siti’s stories

The actress added that  “we cannot summarise or depict how bad the situation is — that’s not what the play is trying to do. The use of metaphor helps me. I need moments of levity, colour, to get me through to the next scene — otherwise I can’t carry it alone.” But warns that “we can’t just rely on a bird” if we’re to effect change.

The sore spots

This levity contrasts with the hair-raising attacks and flashpoints of Israel’s military assault, retold from the perspective of the children no longer with us. Among the tragedies is the senseless raid on al-Shifaa, Gaza’s largest hospital, and the fatal strike on the Abu Hajjaj family residence. The sole survivor, 9-year-old Elham, was left orphaned and severely burned. Despite its lighter notes which darken as it progresses, the play puts its finger on all the sore spots.

As the first UK show to represent a televised genocide, “still unfolding,” Agha reminds us, A Grain of Sand is ultimately a political act. It’s not a play about sentimentality but an elegy for Gazan children. Behind the scenes, multiple discussions were held, she explained, and these eventually spawned an advisory group made up of Gazan artists and writers. Their pain and anguish is felt in every second, minute, and passage – ultimately responding to the impossible question of how, in the midst of a genocide, do you produce art responsibly and truthfully?

There is no single template but as Agha says:

like a grain of sand on a beach, there are thousands, 2.2 million stories and more, we can’t do it all. You cannot account for every grain, but just one is relevant to make up the entire shoreline.

Call to action

By pulling back the curtain on the unspeakable cruelties foisted upon children, the show renders Israel’s excuses inadmissible. It tears away the mask and lays bare the mental horror children endure. But the full depth is accessible only to viewers able to activate their imagination, to pause, and awaken their psyche. Beneath the theatrics, tricksy stories, and fables, there lies an urgent call to action.

Following its initial run at the Arcola Theatre, the tour resumes in Canterbury on February 26, 2026, with the final show set to be staged in Dublin. The full list of dates for the second leg of the tour are accessible here.

Featured image via Good Chance Theatre