One of this season’s premiere theatre events, Palace of the End might be seen as acclaimed playwright Judith Thompson’s first overtly political work. It is about Iraq, and makes a handful of very prominent news stories — torture at Abu Ghraib, the suicide of UN Weapons Inspector David Kelly and civilian deaths during the first Gulf War — the subjects of its three consecutive monologues.

Talking animatedly over the phone after her fifth day of rehearsals, film and stage actor Arsinée Khanjian, who delivers the last monologue, warns that the play is not as brashly topical as its premise suggests. “I am most excited about the possibilities of this play to be understood outside the parameters of what we hear every day about Iraq,” she says. “No doubt the urgency, from a political perspective, is there; there is no escaping that. But what the play does best is to expose the human soul of these events that shape us, that inform us — making us responsible and accountable, really, for what happens, with or without our doing.”

Khanjian plays a character based on Nehrjas al-Saffarh, a member of the Iraqi Communist Party who fought against and was tortured under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in the 1970s, only to be killed by an American bombing during the Gulf War. The ironies of al-Saffarh’s remarkable story are, for Khanjian, many and meaningful, foremost calling into question what it means both to liberate (or to want to liberate) and to be liberated. It’s an idea also expressed in the very ways in which Thompson and Khanjian must represent al-Saffarh.

“There are two characters [in Palace of the End] who are talking to the audience but are dead,” says Khanjian, referring to her own character and to the David Kelly character played by Julian Richings. “So, how do you bring a sense of presence to someone you are bound to think you can’t hear anymore?

“The challenge is to make this history become something that’s told almost as if it’s a memory of the audience’s. To tell the story in a way that’s not didactic, but that gives a sense of it coming from shared values and experiences: being a mother, having children or just being in situations in which you have to make decisions because you are engaged as an individual. I happen to play a mother, and my story is driven so much by her personal relationship with her family, but [Julian Richings’] character is also talking about that engagement, one that extends those family values of love and care.”

Khanjian adds that, even before rehearsals began for Palace, she had been thinking concertedly about such things: the film project she just wrapped with husband Atom Egoyan, tentatively titled Adoration, also has to do with how media can distort human narratives and thwart empathy. “That’s why this play, as well as theatre in general, is so important,” she says. “There is a one-on-one with performance. Ultimately it’s not about how we channel concepts quickly and easily, but how we can get closer to them in the most directed and relatable way possible.”