Ava Hunt threads together her experiences of working in refugee camps in Palestine, her life as an actor, and tales of activism – and asks if it’s possible to make a difference, what risks do we take, and at what cost?  Following a trip to Israel and the West Bank to work in the refugee camps, Hunt created a theatre piece based on Michael Morpurgo’s The Kites are Flying.  But she has since found herself caught between differing impulses – acting or activism, as she put it – and this show has evolved out of her personal crisis.

Hunt makes intelligent use of comical stories from her acting career, particularly the indignity of frothing up enough bubbles to preserve her modesty in a bath commercial. These anecdotes introduce some levity, but also contrast with the stories of those who have committed entirely to activism. It’s during these moments that Hunt’s acting skills are most evident: while portraying the mother of Rachel Corrie, an American activist killed by an Israeli Defence Force armoured bulldozer in Gaza, her seemingly involuntary quivering facial muscles are memorable, as is the intelligent use of sound effects during these dramatic moments.

Alongside the philosophical reflections on the personal cost of activism – and direct accounts of the experiences in Palestine that provoked this piece – Hunt introduces some traditional fables to illustrate the consequences of standing by, the value of insight and vision, and tellingly, the unexpected benefits of simply doing our best. Hunt is an accomplished theatre maker and these different threads are tied together with aplomb. In one particularly strong passage, she takes the story of Irena Sendler, who rescued thousands of children from the Warsaw ghetto but ended up estranged from her own daughter, and relates it to her own relationship with her young son.

There are some loose ends, however. To take one example, Hunt’s friendship with a woman rescued by Sendler ends when the lady discovers that she has intertwined Sendler’s story with that of Corrie. I’d have liked to see more reflection on this – an acknowledgement of the validity of different opinions.

And this points to what, for me, is a problematic imbalance in this play. The politics are strident and one-sided: there’s strong opposition to Israeli policy in the region and the now-standard trope of Tony Blair as bogeyman, both fairly typical positions of left-wing British politics. These opinions are shared by many people – I have some sympathy with them myself – but they are bound to polarise Hunt’s audience. The danger is that she ends up preaching to the converted and alienating the rest, distracting attention from her thought-provoking key theme of what we sacrifice to commit to activism.

Still, this is a brave and thoughtful show, and Hunt is unafraid to ask hard questions of herself: to confess the difficulty of acting alone, and of facing a moment of truth – the admission that she has no answers and that perhaps there are no right answers to give.