Hare travelled to Israel and Palestine at the request of Elyse Dodgson, for the International Department of the Royal Court Theatre, as part of a proposed project for three playwrights, one British, one Israeli and one Palestinian, to write three plays on the British Mandate.
[4][5] However, on his return he proposed to the director Stephen Daldry that he wanted to write a monologue on his experiences.
Hare premiered the work in London in September 1998, in his solo acting debut, in collaboration with Daldry and set designer Ian McNeil.
Here it's the extremism he found, and brilliantly acts out, between warring political-philosophical-religious diehards within each populace, Israeli and Palestinian alike—'people who seek religious justification for excessive behavior on either side.
[16] In April 2000, Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan dismissed the lawsuit and asserted that the plays by Greenstein and Hare were separate entities.