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) How the Oslo Accords became gripping drama As Tony awardwinning play ‘Oslo’ comes to the NT, Con Coughlin shares his memories of covering the actual events it depicts A three-hour play as its subject, Rogers has fashioned an about the Middle unexpected thriller out of the brave East peace process? and inspired Palestinian and Israeli It’s hardly a subject negotiators who came together in to get the pulse a remote Norwegian house to put racing. And yet, aside decades of hostility and make JT Rogers’s new peace. Their efforts were rewarded play Oslo, about with a momentous ceremony on the the astonishing, White House lawn in September behind-the-scenes negotiations that 1993, with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli resulted in the historic Oslo Accords prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, in 1993, won a Tony for Best Play on the PLO chairman, shaking hands Broadway this year, and has already to seal the deal in front of a beaming virtually sold out its month-long run president Bill Clinton. And sitting at the National. Such is the demand anonymously among the thousands that the production, starring Toby of global dignitaries who had flocked Stephens, promptly transfers to the to Washington to witness this historic West End in October. event was Terje Rød-Larsen, the Oslo dramatises a period of history cultivated, softly spoken Norwegian – and a brief spell of optimism – that diplomat who, with his wife Mona is now a distant memory. With so Juul, made it all possible by enabling much of the modern-day Middle East the rival delegations to meet in secret consumed by turmoil and conflict, it’s to thrash out their differences. al-Qaeda, so-called Islamic State, Iraq, As a journalist covering these Syria and Libya that are dominating ext