Palestinian actors perform the play 'Animal Farm' at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Jenin.

Perhaps the last place on Earth you would expect to find live theatre is the Jenin refugee camp at the northern tip of the Palestinian West Bank. The district of Jenin is better known for its cemeteries than for live performances.

This is where Yasser Arafat first hid out after Israel's 1967 conquest of the area; where his Fatah movement's Black Panthers launched attacks against Israel during the first intifada in the late 1980s. It's the place that produced more suicide attackers than any other area during the second intifada, and it's where the crushing 2002 Battle of Jenin took place that left more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israelis dead.

Yet, walk down the unpaved lanes of the camp, past the many posters of martyrs and the banners to Saddam Hussein, and you'll find The Freedom Theatre - a drama school in its third year and a budding acting company that just staged its debut show: a production of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

The play, with a distinctly Palestinian flavour, drew more than 2,000 patrons in its two-week run, and more than its share of controversy. Some said it shamed the Palestinian Authority, accusing it of collaborating with the Israelis; others said it shamed women by allowing them to perform with men. Some people took enough exception to set fire to the adjacent music school last month, and burned the theatre's front door last week, in apparent attempts to burn the place down.
Palestinian actors perform the play 'Animal Farm' at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, near the West Bank city of Jenin

But if the play itself, with its power-corrupts message, seems high drama, the mere existence of this theatre company is a Shakespearean drama of its own.

The scene is 1989, the second year of the Palestinian intifada. Stone-throwing protests against Israeli occupation have spread throughout Gaza and the West Bank. In Jenin, the youthful protesters are joined by older militants who carry out armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. The Jenin camp's schools are closed; its children have nowhere to turn.

Enter Arna Mer, a 59-year-old Jewish peace activist who had been born in a northern collective farm, fought as an 18-year-old to create the state of Israel, joined the Israeli Communist Party and married an Arab-Israeli activist. Since 1967 she had protested against the Israeli occupation and, by 1989, was determined to help the children of Jenin.

On the top floor of a house owned by a local widow name Samira Zubeidi, Ms. Mer opens a children's drama school. Aided by her actor son, Juliano Mer Khamis, she forms a small troupe and provides an artistic and educational outlet for dozens of children, including Ms. Zubeidi's sons, Zakariya and Daoud. For her efforts, Ms. Mer was awarded an alternative Nobel prize in 1993 and the prize money went to create a proper school facility.

The school would survive Ms. Mer's death from cancer in 1996, and Mr. Mer Khamis's departure - until 2002, that is, and the violence of the second intifada. It was destroyed when Israeli bulldozers levelled a section of the camp.

That's when Mr. Mer Khamis would return and make an extraordinary film called Arna's Children, using old and new video footage to show what had happened to those original young children his mother had nurtured.

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