SOURCE: “Is He Himself?,” in Times Literary Supplement, September 18, 1998, p. 25.

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...