[In the following review of Via Dolorosa, Newey finds Hare's stage persona as writer, actor, and moralist confusing.]

Early in his new play about Israel, Sir David Hare quotes a remark by his friend David Grossman on the spirit of place. “I have some sort of mineral reaction to the place I don’t get anywhere else in the world. Just to breathe the air makes me feel happy.” Which place? The Heath—Hampstead Heath, to be precise. For Grossman, its appeal is as the Heimat of secular, if not rootless, cosmopolitanism, on a North Sea roof where not much happens, and no one gets excited about much. And of course, above all, the Heath is common land. This doubtless comes as welcome relief when the lived norm is territorial haggle, down to the very pebble used by the boy David to brain Goliath.

Hare himself strikes a less affirmative note than Grossman: “Playwrights are drawn to places without quite knowing why.” Early on in Via Dolorosa—a monologue performed by the author—he tells us that “I realize, almost without noticing, that for some time my subject as a playwright has been faith.” He admits to being attracted by G. K. Chesterton’s Tertullianesque remark that the Jesus tales are so improbable that they must be true. In a talk to a company rehearsing his last play, Amy’s View, in Tel Aviv, Hare remarks that the piece is “about how we no longer expect society to validate our beliefs. Our only values are private values. The last line of the play is, ‘So. We’re alone.’” But in his Church of England play Racing Demon, his sympathy clearly lies not with cocksure evangelicals, but with the doctrinally etiolated anglicanism of clerics who form an amiably chaotic DSS-at-prayer: not so far from the milksop Anglo-Catholic Sunday School of Hare’s Bexhill-on-Sea boyhood.

Israel appeals not only as the Holy Land but also as a society which validates virtually any belief, no matter how extreme. The ideology sustained by the Netanyahu administration is Blood and Soil, more or less under that name. Moving out still further, we have Israeli fascist organizations like the Kach, founded by the gunslinging rabbi Meir Kahane, not to mention the posthumous renown of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mosque mass-murderer. Theodore Herzl favoured Uganda as the Zionist homeland; the benighted Acholi might have had to contend not with Yoweri Museveni but Ariel Sharon. “Stones or ideas?”, Hare asks. Israel was born in the blood of Deir Yassin, spilt by the Nobel Peace laureate Menachem Begin and his Irgun terrorists. Deir Yassin is now as emphatically écrasé as Carthage, and paved over as a Jerusalem suburb, Givat Shaul, the site obliterated by petrol stations, flats and shops. Some stones are more equal than others.

Hare’s initial attitude of writerly curiosity lies at some remove from the militant agnosticism of his 1996 lecture, “When Shall We Live?”. But his cynicism and apathy get a new lease of life when he falls among zealots. He blots his copybook with his settler hosts at Sheri Tikva in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), when he lets it slip that Lady Hare (the clothes designer Nicole Farhi) is Jewish, but—assimilated. He boggles at the West-Bank Voortrekkers, for whom David Ben-Gurion was a crypto-Communist and Yitzhak Rabin a bleeding-heart liberal, if not a card-carrying fedayee (Rabin vowed in 1988 to use “might, power and beatings” to crush the Intifada, proving as good as his word).

None the less, he withholds explicit judgment even amid the squalor of Gaza. Against this stands the mineral quality of the Biblical stones, of blood and soil. It’s as if Hare can’t quite bring himself to believe in his own lack of conviction. Confusion also surrounds Via Dolorosa itself. It’s unclear in what sense it is drama, and if so, who’s performing it. Up on stage, it’s certainly Sir David himself. But is he himself, or just impersonating himself? Matters are muddied further by the published script, which tells us that Via Dolorosa is “a monologue, ideally to be performed by its author”—who is, indeed, helpfully identified as “Author” thereafter. This is slightly odd, as if this might be a generic designation. Why not “Sir David Hare”, or, indeed, nothing? And, come to that, why the title? The Passion hardly bulks large in Hare’s oeuvre, this piece not excepted.

“I just want to see what it’s like”, he tells us, of his first dip into the greasepaint since playing Cromwell in A Man For All Seasons at the age of fifteen. But the equivocal nature of Hare’s persona is also manifest in his performance. This is not really due to deficient talent or technique; artlessness has its own integrity. And anyway, Hare’s delivery—if that is the word—is not that bad. Although its relative dynamics are sometimes uncertain, wavering between incongruous hectoring and hesitancy, the technical limitations don’t distract. There are, indeed, some brilliant grotesques, and his consistently high-class writing is well attuned to ironies predictably lost on the settlers. He has fun with their baffled attempts to explain Rabin’s assassination, and with the coachloads of shell-suited evangelists from Kansas who de-bus in the Holy City, to find it an altogether more bijou affair than the Disney-sized theme-palace promised in the brochure. But once the piece aspires to reach beyond travelogue to voyage of discovery, self-apotheosis becomes hard to avoid. Towards the end, a scale model of the holy sites descends from on high in a sort of Lego ex machina. Jesus’ walk from the Mount of Olives to Golgotha is paired with Hare’s arrival home in Hampstead, where he is greeted by Blanche, the Hare family dog.

This softens edges which in reality are razor-sharp. There is Israel’s non-withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, in defiance of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the decade-long solitary confinement of Mordechai Vanunu for exposing Israel’s lies about its nuclear capacity, and probable perjury by the legally immunized intelligence services in cases like that of the Circassian Muslim Shin Bet operative Izzat Nasfu. Hare acknowledges the ghastliness of Yasser Arafat and the (as it were) pork-barrel temporizing of the PNA. But writing the conflict up as a drama of faith flirts with the “moral equivalence” which condemns “terrorism” after Palestinian atrocities, but which after a massacre like Hebron calls on “both sides” to “exercise restraint”.