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Via Dolorosa & When Shall We Live?
In 1997, after many invitations, David Hare, a fifty-year-old British playwright, finally visited the fifty-year-old state of Israel while his play Amy's View was in rehearsal in Tel Aviv. During his visit, he traveled around the country, and his discussions with Jewish settlers encompassed the idealism, contradictions, and paranoia at the heart of modern Zionism in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In the play that resulted-written to be performed by the author himself-Hare offers a meditation on this extraordinary trip to both Israel and the Palestinian territory, questioning his own values as searchingly as he examines the powerful beliefs of those he met.
Accompanying Via Dolorosa is Hare's lecture "When Shall We Live?," which also focuses on questions of art and faith-the same questions that have been interwoven throughout all of his extraordinary plays and have placed him in the first rank of dramatists writing today.
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 1999
About the author
David Hare
120 books84 followersSir David Hare (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. Most notable for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hours in 2002, based on the novel written by Michael Cunningham, and The Reader in 2008, based on the novel of the same name written by Bernhard Schlink.
On West End, he had his greatest success with the plays Plenty, which he adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1985, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998). The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982–83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War and The Vertical Hour. He wrote screenplays for the film Wetherby and the BBC drama Page Eight (2011).
As of 2013, Hare has received two Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe Award nominations, three Tony Award nominations and has won a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Laurence Olivier Awards. He has also been awarded several critics' awards such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and received the Golden Bear in 1985. He was knighted in 1998.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ha...
On West End, he had his greatest success with the plays Plenty, which he adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1985, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998). The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982–83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War and The Vertical Hour. He wrote screenplays for the film Wetherby and the BBC drama Page Eight (2011).
As of 2013, Hare has received two Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe Award nominations, three Tony Award nominations and has won a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Laurence Olivier Awards. He has also been awarded several critics' awards such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and received the Golden Bear in 1985. He was knighted in 1998.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ha...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 25, 2020
This was a quick and enjoyable two-parter.
The first is a monologue from Hare reflecting on his visit to the Palestinian territories and Israel. The term "play" is a bit of a misnomer. I really enjoyed his objective editorial approach, which reminded me of graphic novelist Joe Sacco's work on the same subject. He delves into interesting questions, shares second-hand accounts of the effects of Israel's abuse of indigenous Palestinians, and frames his analysis in an overarching concern for human welfare.
The second is a speech delivered to a liberal Christian group. He chronicles the role of the church throughout history and argues for the need of faith, but of the humanist variety.
Though seemingly disparate, the two pieces complement one another in their suggestion that religion ultimately does more harm than good.
The first is a monologue from Hare reflecting on his visit to the Palestinian territories and Israel. The term "play" is a bit of a misnomer. I really enjoyed his objective editorial approach, which reminded me of graphic novelist Joe Sacco's work on the same subject. He delves into interesting questions, shares second-hand accounts of the effects of Israel's abuse of indigenous Palestinians, and frames his analysis in an overarching concern for human welfare.
The second is a speech delivered to a liberal Christian group. He chronicles the role of the church throughout history and argues for the need of faith, but of the humanist variety.
Though seemingly disparate, the two pieces complement one another in their suggestion that religion ultimately does more harm than good.
October 5, 2009
Robin Soans, when acting in his first verbatim piece (a play named Waiting Room Germany, charting the reactions of ex-East and West Berliners five years after the fall of the wall) noted that he was astounded when he noticed that the audience were ‘really listening.’ He eventually accredited this uncharacteristic outburst of attention on behalf of a usually comatose theatre audience to the idea that they had been somehow cast into the play – as receivers of information gleaned through interviews, delivered in the first person to them as if they were the interviewer, they found themselves gripped by what felt like a much more personal theatrical experience than perhaps the standard fourth-wall fare would have yielded.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with Soans; though his own conversion to the possibilities of verbatim theatre thankfully led to him writing the impressive Talking to Terrorists and A State Affair, I haven’t quite given up on other forms of theatre yet. His identification, however, is a useful one to bear in mind when approaching Via Dolorosa, David Hare’s one-man-show about his trip to Israel and Palestine in 1998. Here, we as an audience are not cast into the script – Hare isn’t giving a voice to the various people he met on his travels so much as he is giving us his voice, his opinions, and we – as an audience – are the receivers of anecdotes, the extras in a bar-stool oratorium or maybe an after dinner speech.
The first issue, of course is – why should we care? By his own admission, Hare (or Hare as he appears in this play) knew very little about the situation before he went over – in fact, his original travel plans didn’t include Palestine, and it was only through a process of ideological vetting that he became aware that, in order to present a more ‘balanced’ opinion, he’d need to visit the occupied territories at all. So why should we, as an informed (maybe) audience give up our time and money to listen to an overprivileged white guy give us his questionably shallow views on what is, for a lot of people, an incredibly emotive and intractably complicated issue?
Well, the first answer is that such a response is naïve in the extreme – every piece of information we do not glean directly ourselves but is taken from documented events, reports, even (gulp) The Media has been through exactly this filtering process – usually a lot more than once. Hare is here simply being fairly steadfast and honest about it – and, in a neat little sidestep of Dr Edward Said’s Orientalist assertions of postcolonial ‘unknowability’, is highlighting his own uninformed state as a way of playing with our conceptions of what we think we know, and what we fear that we don’t.
The second is more subtle – speaking in interviews and lectures, Hare has since said that he wrote himself ‘dumber’ than he actually considers himself to be – that his representation on stage was in possession of far less information on the Israel/Palestine conflict than he himself was at the time. He claims that in ‘fictionalizing himself’, he allowed the voices of the people he met to come through with greater clarity, and that his on-stage avatar of an ‘innocent hero’ anchored the drama better for audiences. So much the good – what we are reminded of, as with Rachel Corrie – is the necessarily artificial screen between us and events-as-they-happened (or The Past, or History – as you will) that we often, and media mediums attempt to assist us in doing – try to forget, or to pretend is simply not there.
Via Dolorosa is no more or less than another person’s take on a complicated situation, fully aware of the limitations and faults of their own voice, yet determined to say it anyway. It is no more or less valuable or informative in this sense than the bulk of ‘objective’ reporting coming out of that area; arguments for the standards of ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’ that journalists are supposed to measure themselves against must surely by now have been laughed into the gutters, and as Hare himself says, the lack of pressure to ‘cover a story’ in a particular light by the playwright-as-interviewer means that people are a lot more willing to open up and reveal things they would otherwise jealously guard for fear of misrepresentation.
A couple of Israeli settlers, on that note, viewing the play in New York and hearing their own words quoted back to them, went to Hare afterwards and claimed that he was a ‘very brilliant propagandist’, but when he questioned them as to whether they believed themselves misrepresented, they said ‘Yes, those are the things we said… but they sound different when they’re said on a stage in New York…’
An interesting point about spatial dislocation, no? (The things they had said, by the way, included assertions that Rabin had ordered his own execution, that Nixon ‘saved Israel’s ass so he’s fine by me’, and even Hare’s own summing up of their dangerous mentality ‘This is how we want to live – so fuck you’ was, tellingly, not contested.)
My own problems with this play are manifold - Hare writing himself as 'dumber' seems somewhat a slight on the audience; admitting this after the fact in addition looks a little arrogant. There's also the issue of the title - is he here casting himself-as-writer-as-Christ? What exactly is his rationale behind writing 'Ideally to be played by the author' in the stage directions - if he is, as he states, 'fictionalizing' himself then what is the difference between Hare playing Hare or someone else playing Hare? Why is this difference affected, and what does it mean to us as an audience?
Thematically, however, I have little problem with the text as it stands. Issues to do with the Israeli/Palestine conflict, however, seem to raise hell in a lot of people, and the criticisms that will rage over anybody who dares to try and articulate their own responses are often quite terrifying in their zealous and uncompromising natures.
The most hysterical contestation I've so far come across – and it’s a doozy – comes from one of Hare’s contemporaries, the playwright Arnold Wesker. He wrote a vitriolic open letter to Hare in response to the play; here’s the link, but I recommend no one read it whilst operating heavy machinery or playing with small children:
http://www.arnoldwesker.com/openlette...
Have fun.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with Soans; though his own conversion to the possibilities of verbatim theatre thankfully led to him writing the impressive Talking to Terrorists and A State Affair, I haven’t quite given up on other forms of theatre yet. His identification, however, is a useful one to bear in mind when approaching Via Dolorosa, David Hare’s one-man-show about his trip to Israel and Palestine in 1998. Here, we as an audience are not cast into the script – Hare isn’t giving a voice to the various people he met on his travels so much as he is giving us his voice, his opinions, and we – as an audience – are the receivers of anecdotes, the extras in a bar-stool oratorium or maybe an after dinner speech.
The first issue, of course is – why should we care? By his own admission, Hare (or Hare as he appears in this play) knew very little about the situation before he went over – in fact, his original travel plans didn’t include Palestine, and it was only through a process of ideological vetting that he became aware that, in order to present a more ‘balanced’ opinion, he’d need to visit the occupied territories at all. So why should we, as an informed (maybe) audience give up our time and money to listen to an overprivileged white guy give us his questionably shallow views on what is, for a lot of people, an incredibly emotive and intractably complicated issue?
Well, the first answer is that such a response is naïve in the extreme – every piece of information we do not glean directly ourselves but is taken from documented events, reports, even (gulp) The Media has been through exactly this filtering process – usually a lot more than once. Hare is here simply being fairly steadfast and honest about it – and, in a neat little sidestep of Dr Edward Said’s Orientalist assertions of postcolonial ‘unknowability’, is highlighting his own uninformed state as a way of playing with our conceptions of what we think we know, and what we fear that we don’t.
The second is more subtle – speaking in interviews and lectures, Hare has since said that he wrote himself ‘dumber’ than he actually considers himself to be – that his representation on stage was in possession of far less information on the Israel/Palestine conflict than he himself was at the time. He claims that in ‘fictionalizing himself’, he allowed the voices of the people he met to come through with greater clarity, and that his on-stage avatar of an ‘innocent hero’ anchored the drama better for audiences. So much the good – what we are reminded of, as with Rachel Corrie – is the necessarily artificial screen between us and events-as-they-happened (or The Past, or History – as you will) that we often, and media mediums attempt to assist us in doing – try to forget, or to pretend is simply not there.
Via Dolorosa is no more or less than another person’s take on a complicated situation, fully aware of the limitations and faults of their own voice, yet determined to say it anyway. It is no more or less valuable or informative in this sense than the bulk of ‘objective’ reporting coming out of that area; arguments for the standards of ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’ that journalists are supposed to measure themselves against must surely by now have been laughed into the gutters, and as Hare himself says, the lack of pressure to ‘cover a story’ in a particular light by the playwright-as-interviewer means that people are a lot more willing to open up and reveal things they would otherwise jealously guard for fear of misrepresentation.
A couple of Israeli settlers, on that note, viewing the play in New York and hearing their own words quoted back to them, went to Hare afterwards and claimed that he was a ‘very brilliant propagandist’, but when he questioned them as to whether they believed themselves misrepresented, they said ‘Yes, those are the things we said… but they sound different when they’re said on a stage in New York…’
An interesting point about spatial dislocation, no? (The things they had said, by the way, included assertions that Rabin had ordered his own execution, that Nixon ‘saved Israel’s ass so he’s fine by me’, and even Hare’s own summing up of their dangerous mentality ‘This is how we want to live – so fuck you’ was, tellingly, not contested.)
My own problems with this play are manifold - Hare writing himself as 'dumber' seems somewhat a slight on the audience; admitting this after the fact in addition looks a little arrogant. There's also the issue of the title - is he here casting himself-as-writer-as-Christ? What exactly is his rationale behind writing 'Ideally to be played by the author' in the stage directions - if he is, as he states, 'fictionalizing' himself then what is the difference between Hare playing Hare or someone else playing Hare? Why is this difference affected, and what does it mean to us as an audience?
Thematically, however, I have little problem with the text as it stands. Issues to do with the Israeli/Palestine conflict, however, seem to raise hell in a lot of people, and the criticisms that will rage over anybody who dares to try and articulate their own responses are often quite terrifying in their zealous and uncompromising natures.
The most hysterical contestation I've so far come across – and it’s a doozy – comes from one of Hare’s contemporaries, the playwright Arnold Wesker. He wrote a vitriolic open letter to Hare in response to the play; here’s the link, but I recommend no one read it whilst operating heavy machinery or playing with small children:
http://www.arnoldwesker.com/openlette...
Have fun.
September 12, 2021
These two reflections on religion go well together. The first is a monologue written for performance by Hare himself in response to a trip to the area historically known as Palestine. The second is a lecture in Westminster Abbey that riffs off the quotation from Seneca that provides the title. This develops into a kind of pro vita apologica sua in defence of Hare’s own version of agnosticism. In the process of slaughtering various straw men, however, Hare neither deals with the problem that his own credo (and Seneca’s) is hedged with a thicket of ambiguities every bit as much as those he finds in Christianity, nor with the problem that the possibility of God’s existence poses to his position. The result is a slightly unsatisfactory demolition job with little in the way of constructive insight beyond the well meaning and apt advice to aim to be a better neighbour to your fellow humans than a believer like Margaret Thatcher. Via Dolorosa struck me as more satisfactory. Written in the aftermath of the Oslo accords, it reports Hare’s various conversations with his Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors and records with dispiriting accuracy the unlikelihood of Oslo leading to any significant improvement in the situation.
December 10, 2023
David Hare bracht deze tekst uit als ‘a play’, maar dat is het absoluut niet. Het is een verslag van een bezoek aan Israël en Palestina, met gesprekken en interviews met Joden en Arabieren.
Hare is een theaterauteur, geen journalist, je voelt zijn gevoel voor sfeer en onderliggende emotie, zijn oog voor gedrag en oor voor het woord, en dat maakt dit verslag intenser, menselijker, dus boeiender dan een doorsnee persartikel.
Hare is een theaterauteur, geen journalist, je voelt zijn gevoel voor sfeer en onderliggende emotie, zijn oog voor gedrag en oor voor het woord, en dat maakt dit verslag intenser, menselijker, dus boeiender dan een doorsnee persartikel.
February 13, 2007
In 1997, after many invitations, David Hare, a fifty-year-old British playwright, finally visited the fifty-year-old state of Israel while his play Amy's View was in rehearsal in Tel Aviv. During his visit, he traveled around the country, and his discussions with Jewish settlers encompassed the idealism, contradictions, and paranoia at the heart of modern Zionism in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In the play that resulted-written to be performed by the author himself-Hare offers a meditation on this extraordinary trip to both Israel and the Palestinian territory, questioning his own values as searchingly as he examines the powerful beliefs of those he met.
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June 23, 2015I felt very edgy while I read this -- a current-events (of 1997) monologue play performed by the author, about his own travel experience -- but of course can't remember whether it is in fact politically edgy at all. Or if I'm any judge.
Besides, I read the majority of this tucked up on my best friend's waterbed while everyone else in the house was drinking and having fun. Because I was nothing if not super edgy at high school parties.
Besides, I read the majority of this tucked up on my best friend's waterbed while everyone else in the house was drinking and having fun. Because I was nothing if not super edgy at high school parties.
July 17, 2010
Quick train read. Definitely dated at this point, but interesting. Can't say it sheds major light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or is artistically inspiring in any major way. Just another voice.
March 10, 2015
A funny and exhaustive look at the context of the middle east crises after WWII/ post 67'.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews