For those whose image of women in the Middle East is of chador-cloaked mutes walking behind their husbands, Raeda Ghazaleh might be something of a shock. At 27, she is spearheading a small theatrical revolution among Palestinians in the West Bank. Stephen Daldry, associate director of London's Royal Court, describes her as "a potent force for developing Palestinian playwrights, exceptional as a woman in her cultural context". Elyse Dodgson, head of the theatre's international department, says she has "conviction, determination, vision, respect". And the theatre she founded near Bethlehem is called "Inad", which means "stubborn".
It takes a lot to intimidate Raeda Ghazaleh. She was the first Palestinian to complete a degree at Israel's School of Visual Theatre. Did she find it difficult? "It wasn't easy for them to accept me," she says. "I was young, I was Palestinian, I didn't speak Hebrew. So I learned Hebrew."
She went to the college at the height of the intifada, when young Palestinians erupted in a sustained stone-throwing uprising against the Israeli occupation. Many were killed. Did she feel safe? "Nothing is safe and dying is easy in Palestine," she says. "But you get used to it."
She was chosen out of nowhere by the highflying Stephen Daldry to assist on his production of Rat in the Skull, a play about Ireland. Was she overawed? Well, on the Monday before the opening night, she told him she thought his ending was wrong. And he changed it.
She hasn't even been intimidated by the virtual absence of a theatrical tradition among Palestinian writers. "The war in Palestine took so much energy that it only left room for solitary writing, novels and poems," Ghazaleh says, "not for the group-work of theatre." So she made a wish-list of her favourite novelists or poets and went to see them all. "Imagine some guy writing alone in Hebron; he doesn't expect a young girl to come and persuade him to write for the stage. It's a shock for him," she laughs. Eventually she got together a group of eight writers, culminating in a week of readings at east Jerusalem's legendary Al-Kasaba theatre and, this week, two readings at the Royal Court.
Ghazaleh came to the attention of the Royal Court as part of its vibrant international programme - the very programme that produced David Hare's Via Dolorosa - when Daldry and Dodgson founded a Palestinian playwriting project. "We felt that, led by Raeda, this would be something new and different," Dodgson says.
And indeed it has been. For a start, neither of the plays being read this week is about politics. "People think Palestinians must want to write about politics all the time," Ghazaleh says. "But artists can see society in different ways. Our outer life is clear: we have the enemy and we know the situation. But now in Palestine we have to look to building our inner life; how we build inside ourselves. Our political situation is a part of who we are, but it is not the whole of us."
Ghazaleh grew up close to the theatre - her aunt was an actress - but her drive comes from her father. "He had to work as head of a hotel laundry, so he could not study. He always pushed his children, boys and girls the same, to have the education he so wanted for himself."
Her father also gave her the building for the Inad theatre company. How did she come up with the name? "It was the middle of the intifada and everything was hard, and we were feeling that nothing good was going to happen again. So we said, yes, let's call it Inad, to show that we are stubborn enough to continue."
She believes the intifada was a hopeful time because the Palestinians were fighting back. "Most of the time people now are very down," she says. "You don't see the hope in the eyes that you saw in the intifada. Everything since the beginning of the peace process has gone downhill. This peace process is just a joke." Hers is a young and widely-held belief rarely heard in the west.
But in that gloom there is, she says, a kind of salvation, a national maturity, in developing a homegrown theatrical tradition. "Art, but especially theatre, is a place to be free and open, to say things you can't say on the street or in the family. Society needs it when it tries to build itself. It is about freedom."
International Playwrights is at the Royal Court until June 17. Tel 020-7565 5000 for details.
