Hare on the move

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four).

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). It is extraordinary how Israel’s construction of a 486-mile barrier along its eastern border, at a cost of £2 billion, has been so rarely discussed, let alone acknowledged, by the wider world. Twenty years after the celebrations that greeted the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall, there’s another blot on the earth’s landscape, built so deep, so wide, so high that it can be clearly seen from space and has all the appearance of a permanent memorial to irresolution.

Hare’s monologue took us through the history from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, but he also journeyed in and out of Palestinian and Israeli territory. In Ramallah on the West Bank, the capital of the Palestinian National Authority, he goes to a garden party and eats delicious sweet meat cut from a whole roasted sheep. But the meat turns sour as he hears about the latest form of torture devised by Hamas for those presumed guilty of informing. The victim is shown a drawing of a staircase with a bicycle at the top of it. ‘Go get the bicycle,’ the victim is told. ‘If you don’t, you’ll be beaten.’

‘But it’s a drawing,’ replies the victim.

As Hare commented, it’s the ingenuity that’s so chilling; so much thought put into an act of unthinking brutality.

He visits Nablus, the ancient city founded by the Emperor Vespasian in 72 AD and formerly a thriving market town but now cut off from the outside world by a web of Israeli checkpoints. Hare and his friends drink bitter coffee in a decaying café that was once a fashionable restaurant. He turns round from the table and is suddenly faced by a gleaming new poster of Saddam Hussein on the opposite wall. It makes no sense to him. Why would anyone, no matter how despairing, choose as their hero someone who has done the Arab world so much harm, ‘the master of mass graves and untold massacres’? Hare is told, ‘We hated and despised Saddam but then he stood up to the Americans.’

Thirty minutes with just one voice, no trimmings, no distractions, is a daringly old-fashioned piece of programming. But the monologue takes us back to our aural roots, that quest for human contact and an escape from the ceaseless voice inside. Just as I was beginning to question Hare’s remarks, as coming from a talking head stuck in the West with no real idea what life is like, either for the Israelis who feel so beleaguered that they have felt there is no choice but to wall themselves in, or for the Palestinians trapped on the wrong side of a pile of concrete, he would echo my internal monitor by asking himself the very same questions.

In the mini-series Letters to Mary (Radio Four, Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), three correspondents addressed the radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft, updating her on developments since she wrote her controversial books on the education of girls and the rights of both men and women in the late-18th century. It was such a simple idea but such an effective way of remembering her work.

Professor Janet Todd wondered what Wollstonecraft would make of the way girls are often brought up today. ‘ “Girls should not be obsessed with their appearance,” you said. “Mothers of such daughters are just big children themselves — more like dolls than human beings.” ’ She would, said the professor, have been secretly pleased that girls, now that they are receiving the same education as boys, are proving rather better at it.

In his letter, Richard Reeves, director of the think-tank Demos, reminded Wollstonecraft that in her Vindication of the Rights of Men she wrote in 1790 of the ‘destructive mildew’ that is spawned when those with power ‘contrive to live above their equals and to appear to be richer than they are’. How percipient.