Via Dolorosa

Play (1998)
by David Hare

With David Bryan Jackson

One might think from the title that this play is about Christ, but it’s not, or it’s dominantly not, though it does include a scene on Via Dolorosa, the street in Jerusalem which presumably represents Jesus’ path to his crucifixion. The scene jumps all across Israel and Palestine – from a Jewish settlement on the West Bank to Gaza, to Jerusalem, and to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in that city.

The writing is exquisite. Hare has, without any real window-dressing, given a first-person account of his travels, referring to himself openly and tracking real encounters with writers, politicians, scholars and a host of personalities on both Israeli and Palestinian sides.

One might expect the account of a Britisher visiting in such a way to be distant, austere, removed, haughty, disingenous, patronizing, but it is none of these. Instead there is a slight ironic distance from all of the characters presented, with a reasonable dose of humor as well as pathos. And there is a tone of great honesty in Hare’s writing which is not at all manufactured. He offers a kind of narrative phenomenology of the Middle East by a careful telling of his encounters, and he adds just enough poetry to make the whole gel and seem coherent and potent.

One of the great books about the crisis in the Middle East from several decades back is The Siege (1986) by Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917-2008), an Irish writer and politician who was a delegate to the United Nations. As O’Brien describes it, his delegation, because of alphabetical order, had to sit between Iraq and Israel and he was forced to communicate at close quarters with both of them. The result of that dialogue, and of O’Brien’s generous survey of the issues, is a humanistic account that speaks with the most generous voice a non-involved party can offer.

The result feels the same here. Though Hare goes as a visitor and spectator, his encounters with his various hosts and interlocutors is carefully observed and ingeniously conveyed. Starting with an urging by an American writer friend who he only identifies as Philip – clearly, from the voice, Roth – to go to Israel and witness the extremities of stance and opinion first-hand, and ending with a scene in which Hare returns to his quiet and elegant neighborhood in England, this travelogue drama goes through a tremendous amount of physical, ideological and emotional terrain.

One cannot say enough about David Bryan Jackson’s nuanced and compelling performance. Clearly Hare has written a good play, but Jackson is distinctively responsible for bringing it to life with character, vision and such rich variety that it’s sometimes difficult to believe there is only one person on stage. Compellingly, he creates one character after another and engages them in multiple conversations from both sides, with incredible adeptness.

He seems to carry off the whole enterprise – which takes about ninety-minutes without intermission – with considerable ease, though the effort must be considerable. The sheer weight of text is enormous, and the raft of characters and scenes is multiple and complex. Jackson brings it all to life with gusto, drive, conviction, and even considerable humor where the narrative permits.

Simply but eloquently staged, the production includes deft manipulations of light and sound to convey changes in scene and tone. Effective without being obtrusive, these techniques enable one to feel that the bare stage upon which this theatrical delicacy is performed provides far more complexity than one would have thought possible.

A superb piece of writing, acting and stagecraft, this production offers, in its hour and a half, a balanced and deeply felt portrayal of the complexities of this small, but focal and endlessly challenged, corner of the Middle East.

– BADMan