Once a year in the 2010s, first in the autumn of 2011 and then every spring, a troupe of actors from a burgeoning theatre school in the Jenin refugee camp would board a bus and travel from village to village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Freedom Theatre acting school’s aim: to hear stories locals recount to them and perform them back to them through Playback Theatre, a form of improvisational theatre developed in London in the 1970s.
"We would go to places and say: ‘We didn’t rehearse a play. We are actors. Tell us your story, and we’ll play them back to you’,” Micaela Miranda, co-founder and then-head of the theatre’s acting school, told The New Arab before its run at the PalArt Festival in London earlier this month.
On the sixth tour of the Freedom Bus, in 2016, Miranda and the acting school adapted its approach. This time, they took one story from each village visited and performed it in other villages.
Sharing stories in this way created what Miranda calls a "red thread... a thread that goes through from one heart to another to tell what needs to be told, to be in conversation and in communitarian dialogue."
These real-life, in-dialogue stories formed the basis of the play Return to Palestine. We join Jad, a Palestinian-American visiting and travelling across Palestine for the first time, on an emotional rollercoaster that confounds his expectations and transforms him.
On a stage rendered small to reflect the constraints Israeli occupation places on Palestinians, physical theatre reigns; actors contort their bodies to form unexpectedly functional sets, and use twisted faces and warped voices for powerful characterisation to retell the intertwined stories of Palestine.
"The stories always influenced each other," Miranda, director of Return to Palestine, said of the cumulative story-sharing method in 2016.
"It’s interesting how when you tell the story of powerlessness, the next story that comes is a story of resistance and empowerment, then the next story might be a story of warning, so we can learn about it," she adds.
"This is how the red thread happens, and I believe that the red thread continues to happen – even after the show, I always have loads of Palestinians coming to me and telling me their stories, from the diaspora, Gaza, the West Bank, ’48 Palestine, and how the play moved them and made them feel like they were back in Palestine again."
Keeping the theatre alive
In the decade since its creation, Return to Palestine has travelled far and wide. The Freedom Theatre is currently working with theatre companies in India and Pakistan for adaptations of the show, and the show has already been performed in France, Kuwait, Pakistan, Portugal, the UK, and, in January, Ireland, where President Catherine Connolly, along with members of Irish parliament, attended a performance and met the cast.
"It was a very validating time having stakeholders from a government watching this story, and hoping that it will make a difference," Miranda said.
"I think the story is still quite current because it encompasses a bit of the history of 1948 and the experience of going to Palestine and seeing it with your own eyes, and actually hearing from the people what life is like there and what is really happening – rather than listening to the news, which has so much distortion and deletion," Miranda said of the play’s longevity.
Through these travels, Return to Palestine has become the Freedom Theatre’s envoy to the world beyond Palestine, and a much-needed way of speaking about the theatre itself.
The Freedom Theatre has been a frequent target of Israeli occupation forces' raids, and its members have been arrested and imprisoned.
Particularly devastating were military raids at the start of 2025, part of Israel’s ongoing Operation Iron Wall on the Jenin camp and across the north of the West Bank. That onslaught, still ongoing, has displaced thousands of people and destroyed or damaged more than half of Jenin refugee camp’s structures.
"Our building… we can’t go there because it’s being used by the Israeli army as something between a dormitory and a warehouse,” Miranda said.
"We have more than a million pounds worth of material there – theatre lights, smoke, everything you can imagine – and we can’t access it."
Cut off from its home, the Freedom Theatre has been forced to reset. It keeps up its children's programmes from a building in the centre of the city, and it has managed, fittingly, to put on its latest production of the late Palestinian writer Walid Daqqa’s The Martyrs’ Return to Ramallah at the Al-Kasaba Theatre in Ramallah. The theatre is also looking to bring back the Freedom Bus.
"They’re trying to think of how we can support the community of Jenin camp that has been displaced and separated and scattered through all of the villages around Jenin," Miranda said of the Freedom Theatre’s current priorities.
"It’s very difficult to continue our operations in the way that we did them, because they were done in the camp, for the camp, and now the camp is scattered everywhere. But we’re kind of finding other venues to do our work in."
Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. Follow her on Instagram: @shahlatan