In Rukab Street, the main road through the West Bank city of Ramallah, the saliva flies. With every gesture, each activity begun or completed, young men spit. Above them, toy-like planes soar, spitting out bombs. The air stinks with rage and despair. That's the image created by this striking but undernourished one-hour monologue by Taher Najib, directed for the Rukab Project in Jersualem by the Israeli Ofira Henig, and performed in Arabic with English surtitles by Khalifa Natour. Spitting - a banal, instinctive action - is both an act of aggression and a vivid response to the occupation, an ejection of the misery and hatred that has seeped into every corner of ordinary people's daily existence.

Natour plays an actor who, on his way to the theatre one evening, is stricken by the irony of performing on stage while violent drama unfolds outside on the streets. He and his girlfriend flee for Paris. But the desertion feels to Natour like a betrayal of his homeland, and he decides to return. The Parisian authorities, though, are alarmed at the prospect of an Arab with an Israeli passport flying to Tel Aviv - on the first anniversary of September 11.

An absurd dance of protocol and fear ensues in which Natour, his documents showing both the Arabic name he inherited and another given to him by the Israeli state, becomes less a human being than an officially problematic contradiction. The sense of dispossession, of loss of control and self-determination, is potent. The confusion is not simply a matter of whether Natour is Israeli or Palestinian; when he is regarded with dread as a potential terrorist, his entire morality and belief system are called into question. In making the lead character in his drama an actor, whose stock in trade is the assumption of different identities, Najib invokes a deft metatheatricality to underline the tension between truth and fiction, perception and reality.

Yet the play feels frustratingly shortwinded, the brief insights it offers crying out for further development. Neither is Henig's sparse staging especially stimulating. Natour himself, however, is a passionate presence - and it is his voice, his fierce, wounded intensity, that offers the most compelling glimpse of the condition of living in constant conflict.

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