Theatre Review: The Shock of the News ; THEATRE ALIVE FROM PALESTINE Young Vic London

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As a piece of theatre, Alive from Palestine is exemplary. Four huge piles of newspapers shiver and fall away to disclose five men and a woman. Their lives, like the papers, are fragile, at the mercy of shifts in the wind, and the day's news is the news of yesterday and the day before.

No author is credited for the stories told and performed by the actors of the Al-Kasaba Theatre of Ramallah (in Arabic, with surtitles on three screens), stories which for the most part have the zest and pain of real experience. A few, understandably in the circumstances, are bathetic: a father sorting through his dead boy's possessions says, "I'll give these to your younger brother - …