A Grain of Sand unfolds in a space stripped back to its barest elements, where a mound of sand, a chair, and shifting light become the terrain of a child's inner world, allowing memory, fear and imagination to exist side by side without spectacle or excess.
Written and directed by Elias Matar and performed by Sarah Agha, the one-woman play follows Renad, an 11-year-old girl from Gaza who has been displaced by war and is searching for her family while holding tightly to the stories passed down by her grandmother, including the legend of the Anqaa, the mythical Palestinian phoenix that embodies rebirth and endurance.
Inspired by A Million Kites: Testimonies and Poems from the Children of Gaza by Leila Boukarim and Asaf Luzon, the play draws entirely on real accounts from children living through Israel's bombardment of Gaza, shaping them into a fictionalised narrative that never loses sight of its roots in lived experience.
For Elias, the decision to bring these testimonies to the stage was driven by their resistance to containment on the page.
"What struck me immediately about A Million Kites was the aliveness of the voices; when you read the testimonies, you hear the children shouting out from the pages," he tells The New Arab.
"The purpose of the booklet was to demand the world to know and see — these weren't testimonies that wanted to be archived or quietly read, they wanted to be heard, breathed, and held in a shared space."
Theatre, he explains, offered a form of presence that felt ethically necessary, allowing audiences not simply to absorb information but to share time and space with a living body carrying these words.
"On the page, the words are powerful, but on stage, they become relational. The audience isn’t just receiving information, they are witnessing, listening and being implicated through proximity and time," he says.
That sense of collective listening runs through the production, which avoids overwhelming viewers with images of violence they have already seen and instead makes room for play, boredom, imagination and tenderness alongside grief.
"The show is not trying to amplify or dramatise what is happening to Gaza, we all have seen it," Elias says. "Choosing what not to show was about protecting the complexity of these lives."
Renad herself is not presented as a single representative child but as a carefully constructed composite voice drawn from many testimonies, a choice Elias describes as rooted in care rather than narrative convenience.
"I didn't want to extract a single child's story and place it under the weight of representation," he explains.
Instead, the play makes visible the multiplicity within Renad's voice, with moments when Sarah steps into a narrow spotlight and a line that seemed personal is revealed as the direct testimony of another child, their name and age projected behind her. In this way, individual lives remain distinct even as they are woven into a shared thread, echoing the recurring metaphor of sand as something both singular and immeasurable in its accumulation.
Sarah's performance carries this structure with remarkable control, shifting between youthful curiosity and an older voice shaped by loss without collapsing into imitation or sentimentality.
"As an adult actor, an easy trap to fall into when attempting to embody a child is to act in an excessively infantile manner," she tells The New Arab. "This is something I definitely wanted to avoid."
Drawing on her own memories of being 11 and on extensive research into the lives of children in Gaza, she was struck by how articulate and self-possessed many of them are despite the conditions they endure. "There is an innocence and purity which emanates from these young children, but it is certainly not naivety."
The testimonies themselves became a guiding force, particularly the poetry threaded through A Million Kites, which Sarah describes as a reminder not to underestimate the emotional and intellectual depth of Gaza's youth.
Her performance allows Renad to move fluidly between storytelling and direct address, often recalling her grandmother's folklore before slipping into the voice of another child entirely, a layering that gives the piece its sense of constant motion and shared memory.
As an Irish Palestinian actor born and raised in London, Sarah was acutely aware of the distance between her own life and those of the children whose words she speaks, a tension she did not try to resolve but instead addressed through process and collaboration.
"It was vital to hear what Gazans were saying themselves about their situation, rather than to make assumptions or conjure up details using an uninformed imagination," she says, explaining that verbatim testimony became the spine of the work and that a Gaza advisory group was closely involved throughout development. The aim was not catharsis but responsibility, a way of speaking without claiming ownership over pain.
That responsibility weighs heavily in moments where the play allows testimony to stand almost unadorned, such as when Sarah recounts the words of a young girl named Mariam: "I want to die with my two hands, two legs, one head and many dreams."
Sarah admits that she struggles to say the line each time, not because of performance difficulty but because of what it reveals about a child's anticipation of death, an anticipation so specific and so terrifying that it needs no embellishment.
Performing alone leaves no space for retreat, a vulnerability Sarah says is mirrored in the audience experience.
"There may be nowhere for me to hide as a performer, but there is no fourth wall, so equally there is nowhere for the audience to hide," she says.
With no other actors to absorb attention, the audience becomes an active presence in the room, sharing the weight of remembrance and listening together as the names of children killed scroll endlessly across the backdrop near the play’s close.
Elias hopes that audiences meet the work not as a political argument but as an act of attention.
"I hope people meet the work first as an act of listening," he says. "As memory, yes, but also as intimacy."
If the play resists anything, it is erasure, and if it insists on anything, it is presence, allowing complexity to exist without resolution and trusting the audience to carry their own questions and responsibilities beyond the theatre.
Produced by theatre company Good Chance and touring London venues this month, A Grain of Sand does not offer closure or consolation; instead, it returns again and again to the idea that this story must continue to be told as long as there are people willing to sit, listen, and bear witness.
In doing so, it refuses to let the children of Gaza be reduced to numbers or symbols, insisting instead, as Sarah puts it, that each child is a universe, filled with memory, imagination, and dreams, deserving the space to be heard.
Following its run at the Arcola Theatre from 21 - 31 January 2026, A Grain of Sand will tour to Leeds Playhouse (6 - 7 February), Theatre Clwyd, Mold (9 - 10 February), Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury (26 – 28 February), Bristol Old Vic (3 – 7 March), Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (10 - 12 March), Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (13 - 14 March), Theatre Royal, Plymouth (17 – 18 March), North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford (20 – 21 March), Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (23 – 25 March) and HOME, Manchester (26 – 28 March).
Sarah Khalil is a senior journalist at The New Arab