What essentials does theatre creation demand? Performers, scriptwriters, materials and practice areas, among others. When these elements shrink to their most perilous limits? Ensembles such as Belarus Free Theatre and the Freedom Theatre prove that stage work persists even while explosions and gunfire threaten the venue. The productions reach their viewers.

This holds true for the set of nine brief dramas penned by Palestinian playwrights, poets and artists, and staged by Ahmed Masoud and Micaela Miranda. Four authors remain in Gaza, while two are ex-political detainees, among them Walid Daqqa, a long-held Palestinian prisoner who passed away in custody during 2024. A section from The Martyrs Return to Ramallah (rendered by Julia Choucair Vizoso) blends the absurd with the eerie, showing corpses of captives kept in Israeli facilities and barred from burial as they start conversing among themselves.

Absurd elements appear in multiple pieces, such as The Last Letter by Mohammed Al Qudwa (rendered by Mona Al-Khatib), where a confused figure in the sole remaining house amid a ruined Gazan street gets missives brimming with existential queries and sharp poetry, addressed to the globe and humankind.

Shown on a bare platform by a nimble ensemble of eight performers mostly of Palestinian roots and mounted by Joel Samuels, co-artistic director of Bet'n Lev Theatre together with the White Kite Collective and PalArt Collective, each one conveys immediate tension and calamity, echoing the intensity of Nicolas Kent's recent short-play anthology, Ukraine Unbroken, at the Arcola theatre.

Personal accounts merge with political drama as the action moves through clinics, mortuaries and displacement sites. A portion from We Are... Doctors, by Dareen Tatour (jailed by Israel for her verse) shows a Palestinian health worker informed that expressions of compassion for wounded Palestinians "can be crimes," while Jehad Abu Dayya's Ruins (rendered by Hassan Abdulrazzak) depicts a harrowing scene of a household pinned beneath debris forced to carry out an emergency limb removal.

Five Minutes by Motasem Abu Hasan injects hurried humor as its speaker condenses the detention of a sibling and child in Nablus with heightened comic haste ("I don't have long. London just gave me five minutes"). It stands as potent writing in which his mother pleads with an Israeli soldier for one final embrace with her son, only to be refused.

The Cage, by Ali Abu Yassin (rendered once more by Abdulrazzak) offers satire laced with quiet fury and centers on a girl left immobile by an explosion who stays mute despite (or perhaps due to) turning into a media sensation. The child's fury registers through her prolonged quiet in the face of a world offering assurances of protection.

Several works target younger audiences: Dr Hope and the Lantern of Miracles by Imad Wahba, The Piper by Hossam Al-Madhoun and Santa Claus on Holiday by Nahil Mohana. The last, rendered by Katharine Halls, shows Santa arriving in the shattered landscape of Gaza; he arrives with an empty bag yet emphasizes the value of mirth and optimism.

This theme threads through many of the plays. The setting of these dramas forms "a city of zombies" and stems from "the most absurd of wars," as one figure notes in Ruins. Yet optimism remains alongside terror.

At Theatre 503, London, until 6 June