True there were no mobile phones, a few of which trilled during the performance, in Shakespeare’s time. But close your eyes and you could just about imagine that the children sucking ice lollies running up and down the steps of the Aida refugee camp’s open-air auditorium, were behaving much as the Globe’s younger groundlings would have done four centuries ago.

For Jonathan Holmes, The Tempest has a particular relevance to the Middle East. He is careful not to suggest any exact parallels. But without repeating a fashionable “post-colonial” reading of Caliban as the rebellious, and Ariel as the more collaborative victim of exploiters from outside, he believes the play, set somewhere between Western Europe and the Levant, “becomes a contest for territory between people of different cultures, and between people of the same culture. Shakespeare uses this to explore different systems and ideas of political resistance.”

Aida camp is literally right under Israel’s separation wall. I haven’t visited, but my good friends Amahl and Nidal made a very cool documentary about it.  You can hear them on NPR, too — click here and scroll down to July 7.