It is, we readily admit, our own fault. More than a decade ago, Bernice and I started an annual subscription to the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv, where we saw an impressive range of modern and classic straight and musical theatre, including original Israel works and works in translation. We eventually decided that a journey home of an hour or more was getting too much, and so, when our local cultural centre offered a theatre subscription, we happily signed up.

Without a doubt, it is wonderful being able to walk out of the theatre and arrive home after a ten-minute stroll (or a six-minute power-walk – Bernice and I have never really agreed about how to translate ‘a steady walking pace’ into kilometres per hour). In addition, in the first years of our subscription, we enjoyed several memorable productions. Every year, each of six or seven of the mainstream Israeli theatre companies brings one production to Maale Adumim.

In those first years, there was a good balance of serious and comic drama. However, in the last couple of years it feels as though the balance has tipped towards comedy – and for the most part ‘comedy’ means the slapstick that seems to go down very well with our local audience. In fairness, we are not really in touch with a lot of local popular culture or some modern slang, and this means that we miss a certain amount of the humour. Even allowing for that, slapstick and farce are simply not really our scene.

The other disadvantage of this particular subscription is that each production comes to Maale Adumim for one performance only. Since we aim to be in Portugal three times a year for a month, this sometimes means that we are unable to see a play that we would like to see, and are forced to take a second choice, or to miss out altogether.

Anyway, as we walked home from the last production, when, once again, we had sat stony-faced among an audience of people screaming in delight and struggling to breathe through their laughter, we both decided that enough was enough, and that we had to find another way to feed our habit of live, serious theatre. Enough light, frothy, mindless comedy: let’s see something we can get our teeth into.

After six years of calling me every six months, I had finally persuaded our contact at Cameri that we would never be renewing our subscription. However, I also get a call every year from the Khan theatre in Jerusalem, where we had a subscription many, many years ago. This year’s call, as luck would have it, came a couple of days after Bernice and I had had the conversation, and we decided that we would transfer our allegiance back to the Khan.

For those of you who don’t know it, the Khan is situated in a renovated 19^th Century Ottoman travellers’ inn (or khan). The renovation has retained the architecture and atmosphere of the original site, and the theatre includes an inner courtyard with some seating as you wait to be admitted to the auditorium, a foyer with a modest bar, and two stages: a ‘large’ hall that seats 269, in a stone-walled, -domed and -pillared space that is intimate but airy and has a unique atmosphere, and a small hall that seats 69. Situated just behind the First Station, the theatre is a short walk from a large car park and, on a good night, we can be home in 25 minutes.

The theatre boasts a very talented permanent company of actors, and produces four or five new plays each season, as a well as maintaining a repertoire of 10 productions from the classic repertoire. We have already seen two productions at the highest level, the second of which we saw this past week. It was Early in the Summer of 1970, a monodrama adapted from the novella by the Israeli novelist and peace activist A B Yehoshua, who died 11 months ago.

This is the story, recounted by an Israeli high-school Bible teacher, of his adult son returning to Israel in 1970, with a wife and young son, after several years in academia in the United States. Shortly after his return, the son is called up for reserve duty during the War of Attrition. Not long afterwards, the father is informed that the son has died in action. The play focuses on the father’s reaction to this news, his breaking of the news to his daughter-in-law, and the details of identifying the body, which proves very complicated.

Without revealing any more of the story, let me turn to the production. It starred Yehoyachin Friedlander, a very fine veteran member of the company, whose swan-song this production is to be. It was staged in the small hall, which we had never been in before. The intimacy of the space, and the closeness of the actor to all of the audience, intensified what was already sure to be an intense theatrical experience. From the moment he stepped out on stage, and appeared to focus his eyes on each member of the audience, Friedlander held us rapt for an hour.

During that hour, we explored, through his mesmerising performance, themes of loss and bereavement, the relation between fathers and sons, the peculiarly Israeli situation of parents repeatedly sending their children to die in wars that seem never to end. It was a spell-binding performance, on a stage furnished only with a chair, a table, a Bible and vases of white lilies. Spell-binding, and, at the same time, utterly un-self-conscious. Regular readers will know that I am a sucker for coups de theatre; I thrill to a great theatrical performance. Here, in this tiny space, there was nothing ‘theatrical’ about Friedlander’s performance. It was so understated as to appear completely natural – which is surely the greatest theatrical trick of all.

At the end of the hour, we left the theatre totally drained, and drove home wondering whether comedy was such a bad idea after all.

I should mention that we have also, in the last month, watched a streamed (English) National Theatre production. Prima Facie is about a successful barrister whose career and life are destroyed after she is raped by a colleague at her chambers. This is a bravura monodrama performance, but, once again, it is a draining and bleak evening of theatre.

And then last night we went to the cinema to see The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. If you haven’t read the book, and intend seeing the film, I should insert a spoiler alert here.

Let me attempt the briefest of summaries.

Harold Fry, a retiree, receives a letter from Queenie, an ex-work colleague, who has cancer and is in a hospice 500 miles away. He writes her a brief, feeble note and goes to post it, has second thoughts, and walks to the next post box, and the next. He phones the hospice from a call box and leaves a message. He is coming and she should wait, stay alive while he walks to her. A girl at the petrol filling station where he stops for a snack says something that acts as a catalyst for his nascent project. He tells her he is on foot, delivering a letter to someone with cancer. ‘If you have faith, you can do anything, ’she replies.

As he walks, he reflects: on his marriage to Maureen, with whom he shares a house but, it seems, no intimacy or meaningful relationship and on his son David, from whom he is apparently completely estranged.

As his walk across England, his pilgrimage, progresses, he encounters a string of characters, many of whom respond to his apparent simple decency with honesty, understanding and a willingness to help. He also becomes something of a celebrity, eventually attracting a train of ‘fellow pilgrims’, from whom he ultimately breaks free under cover of night to continue his walk alone.

His walk across England is also marked by his sudden realisation of the beauty, and gradual understanding of the nurturing quality, of the nature that surrounds him, a beauty he has somehow not been aware of previously. “Who knew!’, he murmurs as he looks over a rolling landscape. In an astonishingly eloquent cinematic scene later in the film, when Maureen’s rage breaks through her prim reserve, she rips down the net curtains that have tastefully dressed every window in their home, and we suddenly see an equally beautiful landscape that they might always have admired from their bedroom, were it not for their oh-so-English net curtains.

As the film progresses, we gradually learn, through very short (often dialogue-free) scenes, of his inability to express a connection to David from birth, of David’s troubled adolescence and young adulthood, ending in drugs, alcohol and suicide. It becomes clear that Harold is walking in part to confront, or make amends for, his own feelings of guilt and inadequacy and failure to act.

At the end of the film, Harold reaches the hospice, where Queenie has survived, against medical odds, apparently waiting for Harold’s arrival. She is, however, not able to communicate. Harold’s platitudes at her bedside are as shallow as his original note to her was. However, just before visiting her, he finally surrenders to his anguish over David’s suicide, and breaks down in tears. Immediately after his visit, Maureen arrives, and, in a final scene, they sit together on a bench facing the sea, barely communicating, but finally holding hands.

When we first came out of the cinema, I admit to feeling a little cheated. Over the next half-an-hour or so, in talking about the film with Bernice, I realised that my disappointment was due solely to the fact that I had been anticipating a more uplifting conclusion, to match what I remembered from reading the book. Instead, what the film gives us is a final small gesture of intimacy between Harold and Maureen. Rejecting the perhaps glib happy-ever-after conclusion of the novel, the film instead suggests that this pilgrimage has brought Harold, and Maureen, not to a successful resolution of their horrific family history, but to a point where they can begin working towards that resolution.

Jim Broadbent is completely believable as Harold, in all his tortured anguish and guilt, his impracticality, his basic decency, his gradual opening up. It is not difficult to understand how such an innocent man was completely unable to meet the challenge of David’s troubled life. Penelope Wilton is just as convincing as the wife who has lived with her own secrets and guilt, maintaining a veneer of propriety that Harold’s actions force her to abandon, and, ultimately, making her peace with him and seeking his forgiveness.

A measure of the film’s integrity is that it invited me to reflect, very seriously, on my own experience of parenting. That a story that is so far removed from my own provoked those reflections is, I think, a tribute to the honesty with which the film has been made. As Bernice observed, the fleeting scenes between Harold, Maureen and David were searingly honest and heart-breaking and utterly convincing.

But I hope you will understand that the next thing, indeed the next three things, Bernice and I want to see are something along the lines of Toy Story 5.

On a lighter note (not difficult, you’ll agree), I’m not sure what was absorbing Ollie this week, but Raphael was enjoying a water day in the garden and Tao was being treated on Zoom to one of Nana and Grandpa’s lolly-stick puppet shows. This week was The Three Little Pigs, with a proper happy ending…unless of course you happen to be a wolf.