From The West Bank

David Greig has maintained his position as one of Scotland's most respected, and busy, playwrights this month with his updating of Peter Pan and two contributions to From the West Bank, a triptych of short works that centre around Cora Bisset's energetic direction and performance of An Arab Woman Speaks. Being generally antagonistic to productions that rely on scripts for a foundation, I've often struggled with Greig's words.

Greig takes theatre seriously as a political medium, and both of his musings on The West Bank reveal a mind engaged with serious issues, capable of juxtaposing the political and the personal. An Imagined Sarha, adapted from Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks, and Ramallah ignore neither the human cost nor the broader concerns. If his vision is pro-Palestinian, he does not simply cast the Israelis as villains, and Ramallah goes some way towards acknowledge the limitations of his own perspective on The Middle East.

If contemporary political theatre is diffident about ideology – Facebook status updates withstanding, a common attitude lurks somewhere between apathy and antagonism, and wiser minds are tending towards Epicurus' dictum that politics is not the solution but the problem itself – Greig is canny enough to undercut any sloganeering with a humanistic compassion. Even when he is re-engineering Peter Pan , he is naturalistic in style: both Sarha and Ramallah are driven by character as much as grand political narratives.

This works in Sarha, since the chance meeting of a Palestinian and a Jewish settler over a potent cannabis mixture fades gently into a shared appreciation of being high in the countryside. The Palestinian position, unarmed and informed, is given an airing against a slightly thuggish Israeli claim that this land was given to the Jews by God (and kept by semi-automatic weaponry). Yet Greig keeps the politics in check, detailing the shared humanity of the two men and reminding how, ultimately, politics is a barrier to the genuine pleasures of life.

Ramallah is less effective, slouching into a personal recollection that obscures any political point. Having come at Greig from a nervous perspective – the combination of a naturalist author and a determined look at Middle Eastern conflict made my Live Art muse tremble – I am forced to admit that Sarha is intelligent, informed and entertaining. Cora Bisset's direction is subtle and nicely paced: her dynamic performance of Franca Rame's An Arab Woman Speaks is a strong contrast to Greig's measured tones, and thankfully offers a female voice between the contesting males.

Bisset's monologue, ably assisted by Ewan Donald, has an energy rarely seen outside of frantic male cabaret routines and brings out the adventure of a life lived under the pressure of occupation, both sexual and social. And despite my reservations about naturalism, Greig's sensitivity avoids both the traps of bombast and the awkward poetry that frequently masquerades for scripts. If Ramallah fails, his version of Sarha imagines a theatre that can be meditative without sacrificing polemic.