The image is forever etched in the minds of those who recall it: Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands under the watchful eye of President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn.
At the time, it looked like the dawn of a new era but that was not to be. There is, however, a far deeper and more complex story behind that landmark image.
It involves an unusual couple — both Norwegian diplomats — who secretly got these two unlikeliest of parties to the negotiating table. And it became “the stuff of crackling theatre”, as one reviewer (Ben Brantley, the New York Times) put it.
The play, Oslo, dramatised by J T Rogers and directed by Bartlett Sher, opened on Thursday on Broadway at Vivian Beaumont Theatre at the Lincoln Centre in New York — having played to sell-out houses at the Mitzi E Newhouse Theatre in the city last year.
