Epic drama makes history
Oslo National’s Lyttelton ★★★★★
Super-powered American creativity has been a bulwark against soggy disappointment at the National this year. Unmissable revivals of
Angels in America and Follies have kept attendances high. A major screen-to-stage adaptation of Network is imminent. But before that comes the riveting UK premiere production of Jtrogers’s justly acclaimed, Tony Award-winning Oslo, about the secret Israeli-palestinian negotiations that took place in the Norwegian capital in 1992-93, paving the way for the momentous (if short-lived) Oslo Accords.
Big thanks to the Yanks, then. One of the fascinations about Oslo, though, is the way the then seemingly unassailable US, contemplating a new world order in the wake of Communism’s collapse, was kept so much out of the loop. Yasser Arafat, PLO leader, and Yitzhak
Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, may have met for the first time, for a symbolic handshake, in front of Bill Clinton on the White House lawn but the prime movers behind that rapprochement were a little-known sociologist called Terje Rød-larsen and his wife, Mona Juul, who worked for Norway’s foreign minister.
We meet the latter, along with 14 other real-life “characters” and the same number again in unnamed walk-on parts – director Bartlett Sher’s tense and sharply paced three-hour production deploys a company of 15 actors on a palatial set. That’s an impressive body-count for a “straight play”, but a drop in the ocean in terms of the respective populations. And what’s brilliantly conveyed is the way a tiny vessel of hope managed to navigate its way across a great gulf of hostility and mistrust, steered initially by a handful of fairly marginal figures. Alcohol-assisted small talk and jokes (“constructive ambiguity” as Rødlarsen puts it) helped the enterprise to avoid hitting the rocks of terminal recrimination. Rogers has said that his thriller-like, jumpcutting model was Shakespeare, and cites Noël Coward as a keep-it-light inspiration. The most obvious point of comparison, though, given its deft combination of research, fictional intuition and dramatic compression, is Michael Frayn’s Democracy, fans of which may experience déjà-vu looking at all the blokes in suits. However, here the pivotal players – Toby Stephens’s genial-gauche Rødlarsen Tense talks: Peter Polycarpou and Nabil Elouahabi, above, with Toby Stephens and Lydia Leonard, left and Lydia Leonard’s coolly focused Mona – are required to be tactfully restrained; the butt of humour in his case, the object of male admiration in hers. A lovely moment early on sets the tone: the initial negotiating quartet are assembled and respond in unified, terrified disbelief when they’re told to go into a room and talk alone, without mediation.
It’s a case of watch, learn and marvel: fierce, divisive emotional engagement is kept at bay. And, of course, you know how it will all end, what will come after (the Middle East, the world itself, more antagonised than ever).
Contemplating a handshake that now looks as improbable and distant as the Moon Landing, you’re left gloomily wondering whether we’ll see anything equivalent to Oslo – as much a state of mind as a place, or indeed a document – again in our lifetime.
Until Sept 23 (returns only). Tickets for run at Harold Pinter (Oct 2-Dec 30): 0844 871 7622; atgtickets.com