Reviews

Wall


David Hare’s Wall, which he’s delivering on the Royal Court’s main stage after The Fever each night for one more week (great pairing!) – before he takes it to New York with its brilliant companion piece, Berlin – is a cry of frustration and despair about the current state of the State of Israel.

And it’s a well-meaning, impartial cry of despair, too, focussing on the farcical disaster of the expensive fence that Israel is building – despite the denunciation of the United Nations – to keep the Arabs out while Hamas is firing Qatam rockets over the construction, rendering it useless anyway.

As the novelist David Grossman tells Hare, at the end of his forty minute stand-up performance, the country has become so addicted to the occupation on the West Bank, people have handed their future to the security people; survival is the name of the game.

Hare looks as though he’s been goaded, wound up into a condition of crackling incandescence, by director Stephen Daldry, rushing on to the stage holding his script, dressed austerely in a white shirt, black jeans and black shiny shoes. There is no lectern or glass of water.

He knows most of the text by heart, but he dons his specs to make sure of the trickier passages and casually sheds each page as he finishes with it, allowing it to fall like a leaf, careless of its fate, as if he’s said what he wants to say, and now let’s move on.

Hare’s awkwardness as a performer is part of his charm, so that you feel he’d be saying this anyway if he wasn’t caught up in a theatre. His longer meditation on the dismantling of the Berlin Wall is funnier and more resigned in its analysis of a city that has lost its sense of history; Wall is more urgent, and a great starting point for discussion and argument.

The philosophy of separation is a given, Hamas scares everyone, the spirituality of Jerusalem is destroyed, the country has so many road checks and blockades you can’t go anywhere without delays and hassle. Hare feels pained, frustrated, angry, and the polemic is rooted in an attempt to understand things and people, and an impassioned sense of helplessness.


– Michael Coveney