Masada from Dusk to Dawn

Video mapping is projection fitted to the shape of the thing projected on, so that the surface stops being a wall and starts being part of the picture. The parks authority calls the Masada installation one of the largest such shows ever made in Israel, and its producer, Breeze Creative, describes the subject in the same terms: an isolated cliff in the heart of the desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. Stage lighting works the rock alongside the projectors, and the sound is carried on a purpose-composed score rather than a narration track.

The credits are published by the operator. Design and production: Breeze Creative. Director: Oded Avraham. Script and songwriting: Oren Neeman. Music: Shlomo Gronich. The performers named by the parks authority are Harel Skaat and Liraz Charhi, singing with an orchestra and a choir. The Times of Israel, reporting from the premiere, put the technical package as 4K video, advanced lighting and video mapping, and described the production as a cultural performance rather than an audio-visual show, which is how Goldstein wanted it characterised.

The parks authority attaches two warnings to the show and it is worth taking both at face value. It carries a trigger warning: the piece contains dramatised and illustrated scenes, some of them hard to watch, depicting violence in the war between the Romans and the Jews during the taking of the mountain. And it is recommended for viewers aged 10 and over. The lighting condition the authority lists for the site is 'dark'.

There is more to the evening than the projection. The authority recommends arriving at least an hour before the start, while the light is still going, because separate installations are lit around the site and cover other angles of the mountain's story. At 45 minutes, the projection alone is not most of the evening.

• About 45 minutes, after sunset, Tuesdays and Thursdays
• Video mapping and stage lighting on the western cliff face
• Score by Shlomo Gronich; soloists Harel Skaat and Liraz Charhi
• Trigger warning for dramatised war violence; recommended from age 10
• Pre-show installations open around an hour before the projection

Sound and light at Masada is not new. A son et lumière played at the western foot of the mountain for roughly three decades before 2019, which places its beginning around 1989, though the parks authority does not publish a start date for it and the 30-year figure comes from the Times of Israel's report at the launch of the replacement rather than from the operator. What survives of the older show is the arrangement rather than the content: the same western site, the same open-air theatre pointed at the same cliff, the same two evenings a week.

The new production was commissioned by the parks authority and built over three years at a cost the Times of Israel gives as NIS 10 million. Goldstein told the paper that Breeze Creative had been chosen not only for their technical capability and their feeling for the mountain's story but for their record of delivering on time. It premiered on a Tuesday evening in March 2019.

The most useful independent assessment of what changed came the following year from Guy D. Stiebel of Tel Aviv University, who has excavated at Masada. Writing in Scripta Classica Israelica in 2020, he recorded that in spring 2019 'a new son et lumière (sound and light show) that is devoted to the period of the revolt was inaugurated in the western foot of the site', and that the attempt was not only 'to harness new technologies, such as video-mapping, but also to correct past errors and introduce new data and new approaches to this turbulent period'. He singles out two of those approaches: voices previously unheard, such as those of women, and an emphasis on what he calls the heterorganic nature of the community of rebels and refugees living on the rock during the revolt.

That is a more interesting claim than a marketing line, because it makes the show answerable to the archaeology. A visitor who has read Josephus and nothing else will find the emphasis unfamiliar.

The unusual thing about this site is that nothing has been reconstructed to make it work. The projection surface is the untouched western face of Masada, and the two landmarks the parks authority names as its edges are both genuine: the Roman siege ramp, raised by Legio X Fretensis over a natural spur of rock, and the Northern Palace, Herod's three-terrace residence hung off the northern tip of the plateau. Nothing has been built on the cliff, nothing has been rendered or resurfaced, and the projectors stand on the desert floor rather than on the mountain.

What is modern is everything on the visitor's side of the gap: the open-air theatre and its seating, the car park, the ticket office, the toilets, the paved paths, the road in from Arad, and the Masada West campsite next door with its field kitchens and shower blocks. That division is the reverse of the usual arrangement at an archaeological site, where the ancient thing is the exhibit and the modern thing is the barrier around it. Here the ancient thing is the exhibit and also the equipment.

The height figures do not quite agree. The Times of Israel described the projection as thrown onto cliffs 458 metres high; the parks authority gives the mountain as about 450 metres above the Dead Sea shore. Neither is the height of the projected area, which the operator does not publish, and neither describes the rock above the theatre: the western foot sits well above the Dead Sea, so the face seen from the seats is shorter than the drop on the eastern side.

One consequence of the geography is worth stating plainly. From this theatre the view is of the exact ground the Tenth Legion worked on, from roughly where they worked on it. The siege camps and the circumvallation wall are out there in the dark on the same side, and the ramp path that visitors walk up at dawn starts a short distance from the seats.

• Projected on: the real western cliff, between the siege ramp and the Northern Palace
• Built for the show: theatre, seating, car park, ticket office, toilets, paths
• No structure added to the mountain itself
• The Roman ramp path and the western siege camps are on the same side

The show is devoted to the period of the revolt, and the climax of that period is a story told by a single ancient writer. Flavius Josephus, writing decades afterwards for a Roman readership and not present, describes the rebel commander Eleazar ben Yair persuading the defenders that death is preferable to slavery, ten men chosen by lot to kill the rest, and two women and five children surviving by hiding in a water conduit. Britannica gives the total as 960 dead, and April 15 in the year 73 CE as the date the siege ended, though the year is not securely fixed and is often given as 73 or 74.

The Times of Israel's account of the premiere put the number at 967, describing all but five of the 967 people on the rock dying. The two figures are the same arithmetic seen from different ends: Josephus's 960 dead plus the seven survivors comes to 967. It is a small thing, and it is the sort of small thing that gets copied between guidebooks for years.

The mass suicide itself is disputed on archaeological grounds and has been for decades. Yigael Yadin read twelve inscribed potsherds, one bearing the name Ben Yair, as the lots of Josephus's story; the epigrapher Joseph Naveh thought them too much like ration tags to be identified that way. Skeletons were not found massed as the narrative implies. Jodi Magness, who has excavated here, holds that the question is not one archaeology is equipped to answer, and Stiebel, reviewing her book, rejects Hillel Geva's argument for a second Roman ramp and urban fighting on the summit.

None of that is a reason to skip the show, but it does change what the show is: a dramatisation of a contested account, made by people who knew it was contested. That is what Stiebel means by correcting past errors.

Access is from Arad only, on road 3199, and the parks authority states in its own words that the show is therefore unsuitable for people staying at Ein Gedi or at the HI Masada hostel on the eastern side. In Waze the authority tells visitors to type either 'Masada from Dusk to Dawn' or 'Campsite Masada West'. The drive from the Dead Sea hotels takes about an hour, in the dark, on a desert road, and the last stretch has no lighting.

Tickets are sold in advance only, and the authority says so in bold on the Hebrew page: adult or child ₪45, and ₪35 for Matmon Club members and for guests staying at the overnight campsite, on production of a card or a payment confirmation. Turning up without the document means buying a second ticket. The English price table adds that Matmon members get 25 per cent off, and extends the discount to groups of more than 30 people. Cancellation is free until two days before, costs 5 per cent inside two days, and is not refundable on the day.

The show plays in Hebrew. Headphones for simultaneous translation can be rented in English, German, French, Russian and Spanish for an additional ₪15, which the parks authority publishes on the Masada National Park page rather than on the show's own page. A printed script of the show, including the short film shown at the service centre, is available for visitors who need it.

The seasons are published twice and the two versions do not match. The parks authority's Hebrew page gives March to June at 20:30, July and August at 21:00, September and October at 20:30, and November and December at 19:30. Its English page says the show is closed from January to April, and starts the season in May at 20:30. The Hebrew page is the one carrying live dates, so treat March and April as running and check before travelling. Both agree on July and August at 21:00, and both mark the November and December run as weather dependent.

Sleeping at Masada West puts a visitor at the foot of the Roman ramp path with nothing to organise at four in the morning, which is the standard way to combine the show with sunrise on the summit. The campsite charges ₪64 for an adult in an own tent and ₪47 for a child, and campers get the ₪35 show rate.

• Arad and road 3199 only; no access from the Dead Sea side
• Advance purchase required; ₪45 adult or child, ₪35 for campers and Matmon members
• Translation headphones in five languages for ₪15 extra
• Free cancellation until two days out, 5 per cent after that, nothing on the day