At its best, theatre can entertain, mesmerise, educate and provoke thought, all at the same time. In Naomi Wallace’s The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East we have a perfect example.

Three one-act plays explore the Middle East conflict, cutting through the politics to the human tragedies below. In A State of Innocence a grieving Palestinian mother confronts a young Israeli solider guarding the remnants of a zoo on the Gaze Strip, to be joined by an enigmatic Russian-Jewish architect, who seems to link the other two; in Between this Breath and You, a grieving Palestinian father confronts an Israeli nurse’s aide, claiming a devastatingly poignant link between them; and This Retreating World is a compelling monologue, where an Iraqi pigeon-fancier addresses a convention on his interest, all the while grieving over friends and family he lost as a conscript in Saddam’s army.

All parts in the three plays are taken by three actors, Lisa Came, Daniel Rabin and Raad Rawi, all equally brilliant in their contrasting roles, and able to engender depth of meaning in to their words and their relationships one with another: There is electricity between them.

The set is deceptively simple. Catherine Chapman has created a non-specific, yet haunting war-torn background, enhanced by sympathetic lighting by Matt Savage. Directors Katie Posner and Marcus Romer have echoed this simplicity. No clever effects, bar the last imaginative gesture to the audience to end the monologue, no undue movement, just the intensity of human interplay, emotions from the heart, allowing the script to do the work.

For it is the script which makes the experience so compelling. Wallace uses language to enlighten us, to challenge us, to disorientate any pre-conceived notions we may go in with. She uses the unexpected, as when the young Israeli soldier proves a philosopher, quoting Plato, “he whom love touches not, walks in darkness”. Above all she uses metaphoric and symbolic imagery, especially involving animals, from the zoo of the opening play to the pigeons of the closing one. The titles themselves are multi-layered: Whose State? Whose Innocence? Whose Breath? Whose World? Who’s retreating?

More intriguing is the overall title, The Fever Chart, from The Wasteland by T S Eliot, a poet often reviled for his expressed attitude to Jews. Perhaps it is through Wallace and her like that we can feel “The sharp compassion of the healer’s art, resolving the enigma of the fever chart.”

Ron Powls