I was persuaded to venture from this path to visit the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a theatre in a refugee camp, run by Juliano Mer Khemis, a half Palestinian, half Israeli actor. In retrospect, I ran out of boxes to tick half way through that last sentence. 

Juliano was the first person to ‘get’ what I was doing. Palestinian translators and helpers usually heard that I wanted to walk the length of the wall and promptly indicated to their car. On one occasion a farmer offered to drive me to my intended destination, when I pointed out that the route I wished to follow was farmland with no roads he said, “Is OK I have tractor.”

But when I meet Juliano he said “So what are you doing here?”

“Well `I am walking the length off the Israeli wall talking to as many people as I can and trying to find out what is going on…”

He turned sharply and said, “Fuck. That is what we were going to do!”

He called to a colleague down the hall who stuck his head of the door and shouted, “He’s walking the length of the wall.”

“Fuck” said his colleague.

And so began a decade long relationship with a theatre that resulted in Showtime from the Frontline.

 Working with Dr Sam Beale, who teaches stand-up at Middlesex Uni, I ran a series of stand-up comedy classes in Jenin. Some of our students had never performed before, some were Juliano’s students. Our aim was open up a comedy club in a refugee camp…a very conservative refugee camp surrounded by one of the most heavily armed and trigger happy armies in the world. The result….well you have to watch the show to find out. But what I am happy to tell you is that after many adventures with bureaucracy we managed to get two of our comedic comrades Faisal Abu Alhayjaa and Alaa Shehada to the UK where together we wrote and performed the show we are incredibly proud of; Showtime from The Frontline, the story of how to be yourself when everyone else wants to put you in a box!"