A year after Arts Council England warned arts companies against making political statements comes Cutting The Tightrope (subtitled The Divorce Of Politics From Art), a collection of short plays interrogating censorship and the UK’s complicity in genocide. The show begins with a satirical speech from the ‘festival director’ asking us to be considerate of those who might be offended before transitioning into an imagined pitch-meeting between the ghost of Hind Rajab (the six-year-old who was killed in Gaza last year by the Israeli army) and a theatre programmer, who can’t or won’t put on her play.

The works here move between criticisms of middle-class discomfort and the increasingly draconian government crackdown on activist groups. ‘Florist Of Rafah’, the story of a man waiting for his ten-year-old daughter to find him in a refugee camp, was a stand-out, hardly leaving a dry eye in the audience. Cutting The Tightrope is an incredibly brave piece of theatre, constantly breaking the fourth wall to remind us that this is not just a play, that these actors and writers are risking legal repercussions in speaking out. The show may be cutting one tightrope, but it walks another flawlessly, balancing between unflinching acknowledgement of the atrocities being committed and a fiery determination to do something about it. Rather than allowing its audience to fall into despair, Cutting The Tightrope galvanises us to fight back.

Cutting The Tightrope, Church Hill Theatre, until 17 August, 7.30pm; main picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.