How the Oslo Accords became gripping drama
As Tony awardwinning play ‘Oslo’ comes to the NT, Con Coughlin shares his memories of covering the actual events it depicts
Athree-hour play about the Middle East peace process? It’s hardly a subject to get the pulse racing. And yet, JT Rogers’s new play Oslo, about the astonishing, behind-the-scenes negotiations that resulted in the historic Oslo Accords in 1993, won a Tony for Best Play on Broadway this year, and has already virtually sold out its month-long run at the National. Such is the demand that the production, starring Toby Stephens, promptly transfers to the West End in October.
Oslo dramatises a period of history – and a brief spell of optimism – that is now a distant memory. With so much of the modern-day Middle East consumed by turmoil and conflict, it’s al-qaeda, so-called Islamic State, Iraq, Syria and Libya that are dominating the headlines, not the peace process.
Even as we approach the
100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, whereby Britain committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the uncultivated area of the eastern Mediterranean known as Palestine, the long-running conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is no longer the main story. So much so that theatregoers in New York were heard to remark after a performance of Oslo, “Oh, the PLO! I’d forgotten all about them.”
Yet by taking the art of diplomacy as its subject, Rogers has fashioned an unexpected thriller out of the brave and inspired Palestinian and Israeli negotiators who came together in a remote Norwegian house to put aside decades of hostility and make peace. Their efforts were rewarded with a momentous ceremony on the White House lawn in September 1993, with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, shaking hands to seal the deal in front of a beaming president Bill Clinton. And sitting anonymously among the thousands of global dignitaries who had flocked to Washington to witness this historic event was Terje Rød-larsen, the cultivated, softly spoken Norwegian diplomat who, with his wife Mona Juul, made it all possible by enabling the rival delegations to meet in secret to thrash out their differences.
As a journalist covering these extraordinary events for The Daily Telegraph during the Nineties, I came to know a number of these players personally. Many of them are no longer around to reflect on Rogers’s version of events. Rabin, the great Israeli warrior-turned-politician who agreed to make peace with Arafat, a man most Israelis, as one Israeli character in the play remarks, saw as being akin to “Hitler in his bunker”, was murdered by a Jewish extremist in November 1995 in revenge for signing the deal. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Arafat’s death in a Paris hospital in November 2004 remains a source of controversy among his PLO loyalists, many of whom believe he was poisoned by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. By the time Shimon Peres, the Nobel Prize-winning prime minister of Israel who helped resolve many of the more intangible issues, died more peacefully aged 93 in 2016, he had become one of the most accomplished statesmen of our age.
But perhaps the greatest casualty from that era – when there were genuine expectations on both sides of the Israeli-palestinian divide that the conflict might be resolved peacefully – has been the peace process itself, which today is almost nonexistent. When, for example, I told an Arab ambassador acquaintance I was going to see a preview of the play, he simply remarked: “No one talks about the peace process any more. It doesn’t exist.”
This makes Roger’s examination of one of the most unlikely diplomatic dialogues ever undertaken all the more poignant, as it harks back to an era when reconciliation seemed genuinely possible.
The task facing the rival delegates when they first meet is a daunting one. For the Israelis, if the fact became known that they were talking to the PLO, the government would most likely fall. For the Palestinians, it would mean an assassin’s bullet.
At the heart of this danse macabre stands Rød-larsen, whom I met on several occasions in Jerusalem in the Nineties when the hard work had begun on implementing the deal. A quiet, patient man, he never seemed to be entirely comfortable with the rough-house atmosphere of the region, where disputes were often more likely to be resolved through rocks and rubber bullets than rational persuasion.
Toby Stephens’s portrayal of Rødlarsen gives him a great deal more zest and personality than I recall, but this neatly nuanced performance is key to the pace of this fast-moving, entertaining take on the events (Rogers has said that, in order to liven up what might otherwise seem a prosaic and convoluted political process, he studied the plays of Noël Coward).
My favourite scene from the play is the one where the lead Israeli negotiator, taking a break from the negotiations, entertains his Palestinian counterparts by giving an impersonation of Arafat as an effeminate narcissist, a portrayal I found entirely plausible from my own encounters with the PLO leader, whose vanity knew no bounds.
Uri Savir, who was deputed by Peres to run the Israeli side of the negotiations, was someone else I got to know during that period. An urbane multi-linguist of an academic disposition, I generally found Uri to be softly spoken and thoughtful when discussing regional issues. Philip Arditti’s portrayal of him in the play, though, makes him out to be more like the uncompromising, muscular Israeli type, more usually found in the ranks of the security forces than in the diplomatic service.
Depictions in theatre of almost anything to do with the Middle East tend to stir strong passions among audiences. I was particularly struck by Rogers’ sympathetic understanding of the Palestinian predicament. “I was very anxious about the combustibility of it,” said Rogers in a recent interview. “I assumed there would be controversy [in America] only because someone would be enraged that I had allowed the ‘other side’ to have their say.” Certainly Peter Polycarpou’s depiction of Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian finance minister sent by Arafat to make peace, admirably captures the conflicting emotions of enduring the pain of exile while seeking to wreak terrible vengeance on the Israeli occupiers.
Indeed, for all the quips and light-hearted banter, Oslo is, at heart, a deeply emotional drama. When the Israelis finally strike a deal with the Palestinians during a telephone call to Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis, they think they can hear music playing in the background. In fact it is the battle-hardened veterans of the PLO sobbing at the prospect of being allowed to return to their homeland.
Ultimately, the play is an implicit tragedy about the failure of both sides to build a lasting peace on the basis of the painful concessions made during the Oslo negotiations. “Between our peoples lies a vast ocean,” says Ahmed Qurei, the finance minister for the PLO, in the play, just before the negotiations start. Twenty-five years on, that ocean seems as vast as ever.
‘Perhaps the greatest casualty from that era has been the peace process itself, which today is almost nonexistent’