Wall – a response

There must be a great sense of accomplishment appearing at the Royal Court to speak of matters most poignant to you, your country and the world.

In Wall, David Hare conjures a vision of the future; drawing on history that is being written as we speak, his journies make faraway lands feel less distant, less foreign than we’d have them be. He speaks of a wall. Not of a particular point in time, but of a repeated event split by perspective; a solid structure separating Israel from Palestine. And Hare, as he states, has ‘acquaintances on both sides’.

His speech oscillates from the factual to the personal. Like a book, whose form certifies its text, he physicalizes his discourse and its affront on popular opinion through the subtle sliding of spectacles on and off his nose.

His expressions are amplified by the white cube that forms the stage. It becomes a space of projection, a sculpture of speech as he drops his papers one by one to the floor. This space could be anywhere. Its walls could divide anything the audience imagined that night – except one thing: the wall between us and him.

Hare talks of the wall as a social phenomenon, a geographic and political one. An architectural feature that turns rigid and real when soldiers guard its openings; faced with a barrage of fiery thoughts from single-file citizens within and without. You build a wall and suddenly you find yourself caught up in the barbed wire, watching shadows on both sides.

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, two decades of globalisation and lightning cultural change. Yet in the Middle East another wall has been built, cutting through newly formed identities and developments. Of what significance is Hare’s story in this intercultural dialogue? Perhaps it is his exposition of ambivalence and complexity – the wall as symbol of religion, faith and destruction at the same time. A wall built on ancient, sacred ground; concrete roots under a shifting topsoil.

So I wonder – where will all this lead in a century of global noise, of wars fought on other people’s lands, of tensions that wrinkle the fabric of time?