Via Dolorosa

Synopsis

Via Dolorosa had its origins in 1997, when the then 50 year-old David Hare paid a three-week visit to Israel, celebrating its own 50th Birthday at the time. Deeply touched by the experience, he began the memoir that became Via Dolorosa. In the course of playing some 33 people on stage - from a family of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to a Palestinian politician in Gaza - Hare meditates on the region's age-old conflicts and questions his own values as searchingly as the powerful beliefs, passions, prejudices and suspicions of those he met.

Our Review:

19 July 2002

I am an ignorant Gentile. I frequently flip past the world section of the newspaper when, as seems to be the case nearly every day now, there are yet more reports about yet more suicide bombs, more failed talks, more bloodshed in the Middle East. I do not begin to comprehend the depth of such passions and their apparent futility frustrates and terrifies me.

British playwright David Hare - also a Gentile, but with a Jewish wife - evidently shares my frustration and terror, though it is his much more considerable efforts to at least try to make sense of the situation that informs this one-man show, which he also performs, and that inspires him to remount it now, four years after making his stage acting debut in its first West End outing.

It was in 1997 that the 50-year-old playwright decided to at last visit Israel, the then 50-year-old state which was and is, always, "first and foremost a cause; the cause being a patch of land". During that visit, he met with people on all...

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