BAGHDAD - The young performers were funny, the audience giggled and clapped, and the message at a children's theatre festival in Iraq's National Theatre was as serious as it was entertaining.

"I am fast! I am fast! Ha ha!" taunted 11-year-old Abathir Fadhil, bouncing around the stage in a furry bunny suit in the classic story of the tortoise and the hare.

"You want to be my friend? But you are so slow! You can't be my friend," he teased the tortoise, played by a young girl in a short green skirt and cardboard shell.

For those who don't know the story, the quick hare ends up getting hurt and relies on the slow tortoise to help him.

"Help me, my friend!" shouted the hare, to the crowd's delight. A chorus of children shouted back: "What did you say?"

"Help me, my friend!"

The play was called "How Beautiful Is Friendship" and in a country where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in sectarian violence, the point was clear.

"They are Christians, Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites. They are all friends and you can feel that despite their differences," director Suhaila Abdul-Hussein, said of her cast on Thursday.

"From the idea of friendship among children and people, the playwright has presented us with a nice script about friendship. Thank God, we found that children were responsive."

The six-day festival is being held in Iraq's ornate National Theatre building in central Baghdad, once the site of lavish performances by orchestras and dance troops and now rarely used.

Violence in Iraq has diminished over recent months, with the number of attacks falling 60 percent since June. The festival was one more sign of a city slowly coming back to life.

The audience was made up mainly of family members of the child actors but adult Iraqi actors, students and some children invited from the streets also came to watch.

Abathir, sweaty and animated after his performance as the hare, pronounced himself pleased.

"I am very happy with my performance today," he said. "I've participated in two plays before. This is the third.

"It taught me about friendship, how to be a friend to others and how to build my country in the future."

The audience liked it, too.

"The play was great, honestly it was so great," gushed Maysaim Mehdi, a college student who came to watch.

"If Iraqi children have such talents, let's not hide it, let's work on creating and developing it more and more."