Tony time is always fun—not so much as a seasonal exercise in stocktaking but as a chance to see whether there’s any stock to be taken. The old rule used to be that if you were still running when nominations closed, they’d find a category to fit you into. But this year they decided it was time to reassert some basic values: the new play category can apparently embrace the late Tennessee Williams, who hasn’t written anything in some time, but not David Hare, who very obligingly writes a play every other week and is now responsible for about 40 percent of all new work on Broadway every season. Were the Tony boys grateful? Hah!

They seemed to take especial pleasure in disdaining Hare’s opus du jour (literally), Via Dolorosa, currently at the Booth and advertised by its producers as a “play.” Don’t go expecting much in the way of plots, characters, furniture, etc. It’s actually a monologue about the Arab/Israeli conflict performed by Hare himself. Some of my colleagues referred to it as an after-dinner speech, which sounds even less promising, given that the Booth hasn’t got a meals license and its uncomfortable chairs are not conducive to postprandial raconteurial wit. Fortunately, there isn’t any on display. About two minutes in, you suddenly realize you’ve paid Broadway prices to hear an English public schoolboy talk about what he did in his holidays. Hare is not a compelling speaker—he doesn’t have the stylistic flourishes of Liam Neeson,