With just two actors and an almost bare stage, Israeli director Orly Rabinyan's production of Julia Pascal's latest play gets to grips with the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with rare clarity.

Rather than take on the whole of Israeli and Palestinian history, Pascal focuses on one notorious event out of which the positions of both sides get a decent airing.

For most of us it is hard to imagine the circumstances in which we would kill for our country. But what drives a person not only to kill in cold blood, but to do it for someone else's country?

It is not unreasonable to refuse a journalist a copy of a new play script before an interview with its author. These things are a work in progress after all, right up until press night. Producers might correctly calculate that it is best to keep a new plot under wraps.

Where Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years was all about a talkative north-west London Jewish household in which barely a thought or an emotion went unuttered, his latest domestic drama at the National Theatre is concerned with the indigenous English, whose pain and joy (though there is not much of the latter here) is no less deeply felt but is communicated with telling silences and soothing proverbs.

The adage "it takes one to know one" has been taken to heart by British theatre directors in recent times. Jewish characters are these days cast with Jewish actors. Think of Ryan Craig's The Holy Rosenbergs and Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years at the National Theatre, or Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup With Barley at the Royal Court.

Thankfully, fashion does not extend to directors.