Wall

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Reviews

4 stars Michael Billington, Guardian, 20/4/09

David Hare is British drama’s leading foreign correspondent. And now, as a companion piece to Berlin, he offers a matching monologue called Wall. It deals with what the Israelis term the “security fence”, that will eventually be four times as long as its East German prototype, designed to protect them from Palestinian incursion. Like Via Dolorosa, the piece is performed by Hare himself and is an equally gripping example of humane reportage in the James Cameron tradition.

Hare is canny enough to talk to people on both sides of the barrier. Israeli friends variously see the wall as a pragmatic success, in that it has reduced terrorist attacks by 80%, and an admission of failure. Most damning of all is the acceptance by Professor Neill Lochery that the wall is a “white elephant” in that Israel’s enemies have switched tactics from suicide-bombing to missile-firing. In short, the wall, which will have cost the Israelis bn, has its own built-in obsolesence.

But Hare is at his best when he reports, as it were, from the ground. Setting out from the West Bank’s Ramallah with a Palestinian friend to visit the ancient city of Nablus, he graphically describes the frustrations they undergo at one of the 699 Israeli checkpoints. At Nablus itself, a once-thriving trade centre now reduced to poverty, Hare’s simmering anger turns on his hosts when he spots a poster in a cafe of Saddam Hussein. But, though Hare retains the observer’s capacity to look at the issue from both sides, in the end he implicitly endorses David Grossman’s point that Israel has become “addicted to occupation” and that survival is now its only aim.

Presenting his arguments with force and clarity, under Stephen Daldry’s direction, Hare mixes description with opinion in a manner that would now be impossible on television. In a fascinating reversal of values we increasingly look to the theatre, once seen as a source of escape, for this kind of informed commentary on the state of the world.

4 stars Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard 20.04.09

Banging his head against that Wall

There will come a time when we wont need to bother with the news. We’ll just tune in or turn up to a theatre to listen to David Hare’s thoughts on Iraq or the state of the Labour Government and go away suitably informed and chastened.

Here, Hare turns his formidable attention to the Israeli security fence, which will one day be four times as long as the Berlin Wall. That comparison is pertinent, as this monologue, delivered with gusto by the author, was conceived as a companion piece to his other recent solo offering, Berlin. In the latter, Hare looked at the expansiveness of a post-Wall world. Here, his subject is the narrowness of a society that is building a barrier to keep people out.

Hare has trodden dramatically in the Middle East before, with Via Dolorosa (1998). This time around, his focus is more precise: what sense of hopelessness could have induced a country to make its feelings of fear so literally concrete?

Galloping up the aisle onto the stage, Hare assures us that he has friends on both sides of the conflict and we’re off, for precision-drilled statistics and a dizzying tour of Israeli checkpoints and Palestinian humiliation.

The performance lasts 40 minutes, although this is positively Hamlet-like compared to the 10 that Caryl Churchill devoted to the entire history of Israel in Seven Jewish Children. In many trips to the region, Hare has listened, empathised, learned and processed this learning, and we do our best to absorb the results, which see him standing on stage and reading, at a great lick and with much charisma, from a script.

Yet because he has chosen to present this material theatrically, rather than, say, as an essay, I couldn’t help moments of distraction.

Why can’t director Stephen Daldry stop him moving his head at odd angles, like a tortoise with a crick in its neck? Wall’s closing, bitter irony brushes away such nonsenses: terrorists now prefer launching missiles to suicide-bombing, meaning that the barrier is obsolete before its even finished.

4 stars Michael Coveney, Whats on Stage, 20 April 2009

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 lets 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.