Will The Two Walk Together

It’s hard to imagine David Ben Gurion having a friendly chat with Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, much less cooking an omelet for his political adversary, but that’s exactly what happens in A.B. Yehoshua’s play Will The Two Walk Together, a co-production of the Cameri and Herzliya Theatres, directed by Oded Kotler. Yehoshua’s play is inspired by his research into secret meetings between the two men that took place in London in 1934, in an attempt to see if the two rival movements could find a way to work together.

When the two men meet in a hotel room in London, what begins as a clash between two ideologies becomes a meeting between two men. Rami Baruch as Ben Gurion and Gil Frank as Jabotinsky create vivid portraits of the two leaders. Baruch embodied the character entirely, taking on the pragmatic, direct manner and body language of the Labor Zionist leader and future Prime Minister of Israel. It felt as though I were seeing the man himself onstage. Frank conveyed the poetic aspect of Jabotinsky, the dashing intellectual capable of mesmerizing his listeners, reciting Lermontov in Russian and Jabotinsky’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in Hebrew.

Revealing the human and the individual aspects of two mythological figures, Oded Kotler brings a little known chapter in Israeli history to life with humor and sensitivity. In light of the deep divide between left and right in Israel today, it is tantalizing to imagine an alternative historical trajectory, what might have been had these two men founded a political alliance in that hotel room in London.