Via Dolorosa
By interpreting the conclusion of one of his own plays in this monologue–which Hare has performed himself up until this Apple Tree Theatre production–the playwright not only shows he’s very consciously conveying messages in his works but calls attention to how he closes this one, an account of his three-week journey to Israel. He ends by intoning its title, but just before that he asks, “Stones or ideas?” That is to say, what’s more important, the tangible or the conceptual? In Israel, is the spirit of a religion and its homeland more important or the country’s physical contours? He might also be referring to the disparity between his own somewhat detached, intellectual existence in England and the passionate, conflictual world he witnesses in Israel.
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As Hare observes in Via Dolorosa, people are fully engaged there: they quarrel passionately, and their angers and fears are real. When a director stages Romeo and Juliet with Israelis as Montagues and Palestinians as Capulets, the hostilities between cast members are far more profound than anything Hare might have seen backstage when a British company produced his Secret Rapture.
Hare presents all the activists and politicians he describes as equally committed and, in their own eccentric ways, sympathetic. At the same time that he admires their passion, however, he seems to regard such real-life folks as Menachem Begin’s son Benny–an outspoken proponent of Jewish settlements in disputed territory–more as characters than people, with an amused, somewhat supercilious smile. Early on, as if to defuse accusations of bias, Hare mentions that the writers David Grossman and Philip Roth are his friends and that he’s married to a Turkish Jew. But these references register as “Some of my best friends are…” Jewish name-dropping. Strangest of all, though, is how little Hare reveals of his politics. More journalist or oral historian here than impassioned playwright, he moves from one character to another, confining his remarks to asides or observations of a more personal than political nature. He may be attempting to demonstrate the detachment and ignorance of his culture, but the feeling one comes away with is that Hare is trying extremely hard not to offend.
