With the situation deteriorating daily in the Middle East, it is a brave dramatist who takes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, although Tony Craze's 70-minute Passion is inevitably overtaken by events, it strikes me as an honourable and engrossing attempt to explore the gulf between well-intentioned western liberalism and burning Palestinian rage.
At the outset Craze asks us to accept an unlikely premise: the impending signing of a peace treaty involving Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the immediate declaration of a Palestinian state. It is this that brings together, but ultimately divides, his two characters, Bill, a famous British TV journalist, and Hanna, a militant Palestinian with whom he has been having a spasmodic, adulterous affair. On the day the treaty is to be signed, and just before Bill is about to interview Arafat in Ramallah, Hanna makes it clear that she rejects both rapprochement and her lover - unless, that is, Bill is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
What Craze catches particularly well is the inability of western observers to understand the depths of Palestinian despair. Arafat is distrusted, peace is seen as a betrayal and there is a constant "hidden violence" towards the Palestinians typified by the ludicrously low prices paid for their olives. Craze doesn't attempt to vindicate a "culture of martyrdom", but he does his best to explain it, which is rare on the British stage. If his play has a fault, it is that it never persuades you that Bill and Hanna are lovers. If they are as physically intimate as the play assumes, you would have thought Bill might already have guessed that Hanna was a Hamas sympathiser.
Craze is up against a problem articulated by David Hare in his play Via Dolorosa: fiction pales beside fact. But Craze takes us inside the mind of a Palestinian militant and behind the images of bloodshed we see nightly on our screens. In Malcolm Sutherland's tense production, Andrew Hall lends the naively optimistic Bill exactly the right kind of liberal earnestness and Karina Fernandez is watchfully impassioned as Hanna. The dialogue sometimes falls into speechiness, as when Bill ill-advisedly tells us, "I had a dream." But the play's faults matter less than its admirable willingness to dramatise politics and explore the injustice that breeds desperate violence.
Until April 20. Box office: 020-7352 1967.
