Secret gays among the Tories, abortion and a jokey show about the NHS have featured in the National Youth Theatre’s offerings this summer. A glittering feather in its cap was the chance to participate in the closing ceremony in Beijing. Now comes Shelley Silas’s short play about ice-cream.

Not that Oliver Hawes’s Rami, the ice-cream seller, has much of it to sell, this being Gaza and the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints delaying everything that moves. Someone they do let through is Adrian (Christopher Sheridan), a British Jew so fatuously naive that he makes Voltaire’s Candide look like Einstein. “I don’t believe in war,” Silas makes him say, as if the evidence for its existence wasn’t all around him in that tormented territory. Listening to the call of the distant muezzin he exclaims, “It’s so romantic!” and even the tolerant Rami feels impelled to say that isn’t what the call is about.

The noodle has come to Gaza to understand the situation for himself, and Silas’s intention is presumably to float aspects of its grim nature before us, using a dozen characters and an ensemble of Palestinian women to give roles to young NYT members.

Since her previous plays have been seen at several respected venues, it is a pity she could not have come up with something sturdier than this succession of tiny episodes.

At times it isn’t even clear what is going on. The change of scene between Gaza and Israel is capably indicated by rotating the ice-cream van – one side the counter, the other side barbed wire and a metal fence – but at one point the women walk across the stage holding up Israeli flags, and the Palestinian man most desperate to throw rocks at the soldiers speaks with a strong Irish accent. This may be intended to link him to other occupations but it doesn’t help us to accept him as Palestinian.

A troubled Israeli soldier has doubts about manning a checkpoint; his bloodthirsty girlfriend longs to shoot someone; his brother talks of family pride. Over on the beach a mother stares out to sea mourning her dead son – drowned, it emerges, while paddling a canoe. It is a play of fragments, loosely set in a context too flimsily evoked. The actors, and Gaza too, deserve better than this.

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