I was surprised to find the theatre showing Via Dolorosa packed at 9:45 in the morning. I mean, who wants to accompany David Hare played by Gary Hay at that time in the morning across Israel, Gaza and of course the Via Dolorosa a route in Jerusalem that represents Christ’s walk to his crucifixion?
It seems lots of people do, since tickets for the entire run are practically sold out and the Edinburgh Fringe has only just started.
David Hare refers to his monologue, which was first performed in 1998, as dramatic journalism, and it's certainly that. We meet theatre practitioners, politicians, aid workers and settlers on the West Bank whose comments illustrate a fractured society with vivid rhetoric, metaphors and frustration.
A series of slim tripods holding different coloured cards stand in a semicircle at the back of the performance space as a visual guide to our journey. Each is headlined with the stopping point, below which are the names of the people we will meet in that particular leg of our travels. The show will begin and end in Hampstead, a place he depicts as existing in sleepy complacency.
In contrast, most of those he meets are passionate in their opinions even about Israeli society, a place where David Grossman says, “we seized land, we took land by conquest... of course, I want Israelis to have access to the Wailing Wall, but I don't need to own it.”
Eran Baniel, the producer of Romeo and Juliet, asks Hare if he’d been to the settlements in the Palestinian territories where “you have the obscene spectacle of Israelis sitting by their swimming pools while Palestinians carry their drinking water around in jerry cans…”
In voice and manner, Gary Hay reflects our surprise and astonishment at some of the things said by the people he talks to en route. How could the group of settlers he stays with on the West Bank think that the murder of the Israeli politician Rabin was somehow part of a government plot to discredit the right wing? But that's what they passionately claim.
Moving on to Gaza felt like moving from wealth and luxury to awful poverty, where people earn a mere “8% of their opposite number in Israel.” As if in a leCarré film, he is quickly bundled into a car under the eye of Israeli gun turrets.
My favourite metaphor illustrating the situation in Palestine is that given to Hare by the Palestinian historian Albert Aghazerin, who compares the situation to a man “jumping from a burning building and they happened to land and break the neck of a man who was passing. And when the man says, 'Hey, you've broken my neck', they say, 'Sorry, it's because of the fire.' And when the man says, 'Yes, but my neck's broken', they just break his arm.”
This riveting, thoughtful monologue delivered with fluent ease by Gary Hay constantly throws up important, interesting participants in this historic tragedy. Twenty-six years on, it still seems incredibly important and watchable. Everyone should see it.
Space Venue is now adding additional performances over the coming weekend.