HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023287.jpg

Source: The Daily Telegraph {Main}
Edition:
Country: UK
Date: Friday 15, September 2017
Page: 28
Area: 996 sq. cm
Circulation: ABC 477927 Daily
Ad data: page rate £46,000.00, scc rate £214.00
Phone: 020 7931 2000
Keyword: National Theatre (National)

G Gorkana
A CISION company

How the Oslo Accords became gripping drama

As Tony award-winning play ‘Oslo’ comes to the NT, Con Coughlin shares his memories of covering the actual events it depicts

A three-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

Reproduced by Gorkana under licence from the NLA (newspapers), CLA (magazines), FT (Financial Times/ft.com) or other copyright owner. No further copying (including printing of digital cuttings), digital reproduction/forwarding of the cutting is permitted except under licence from the copyright owner. All FT content is copyright The Financial Times Ltd.
Article Page 1 of 4
401552537 - NICTHO - A23578-1 - 129616737
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023287