Alaa Shehada's *The Bridge*, showing at Assembly George Square studios in Edinburgh before transferring to the Bush Theatre in London, recounts a seemingly ordinary errand from his youth in the West Bank: delivering a jerry can of home-pressed olive oil to his aunt in Jordan. What should be a simple journey becomes an odyssey through the Allenby/King Hussein/Dignity Bridge crossing, a 180-metre stretch that comes to symbolise the wider indignities of occupation, making the piece both a personal memoir and a pointed political statement.

Shehada plays a range of characters encountered along the way, from a boastful taxi driver to an overbearing fellow passenger and impassive Israeli teenage guards at the checkpoints, conveying the stifling heat, faulty air conditioning and oppressive bureaucracy of the crossing. The show, a follow-up to his earlier work *The Horse of Jenin*, is co-written and directed by Sam Beale for the Palestine Comedy Club; the review describes it as more restrained and focused than its predecessor but no less urgent, with the olive oil serving as a symbol of land under threat from settler expansion. It runs in Edinburgh on 30 August, then at London's Bush Theatre from 28 October to 11 November.