Whisper it, but it might just be possible that a major new voice has arrived on the British stage. True, at 35 playwright Josh Azouz has been around for a while.  But with his latest work, which goes by the more than faintly familiar title of Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia, even he recognises that he and the play might represent something rather rare in this country’s theatre culture. 
 “There are very few Sephardi British Jewish voices,’ he observes. “So I am interested to explore those stories. But not only those stories of course,” he quickly adds, as if the theatre gods were looking for a reason to pigeonhole him for all time.  
They would have a job.  His latest play audaciously conveys life under the Nazis in north Africa but without the ramrod seriousness with which extreme suffering is normally conveyed. More of this later.  For the moment let us dwell on Azouz’s knack for finding subjects that have rarely, if ever, been seen in a theatre. 
For example, when his two-hander The Mikvah Project was revived at The Orange Tree last year (before it was ripped from the stage by the pandemic)  the only people who would have seen a play about two Orthodox Jewish men who fall for each other while spiritually cleansing themselves would have been those who encountered the original production at The Yard Theatre in 2015. 
So although nobody thinks that as a subject life under the Nazis is unrepresented in stage drama, Azouz’s still stands out. “It’s an opportunity to talk about the war from a Sephardic Jewish lens,” is the way he describes it when we meet on Zoom at the end of a day’s rehearsal at the Almeida Theatre where the play has just opened. 
“Actually, I think I should clarify,” he adds..  “I think it is actually a mostly Muslim Arab and a Sephardic Jewish lens. When we think of World War Two and the Holocaust we think of Europe.  I don’t think North Africa has been on stage and I thought, ‘how interesting to explore Arab Jewish relationships at a time just before the creation of Israel.’” 
In Azouz’s play that Arab/Jewish relationship is represented respectively by a Jewish and Arab couple who were best friends before the Germans occupied Tunisia.  But under the cruel rule of Nazi officer Grandma (yes, Grandma, but more on character names later) played in Eleanor Rhode’s production by Adrian Edmondson, the friendships come under intense pressure. 
Take the opening scene in which Jewish Victor (Pierro Niel-Mee) is buried up to his neck in the Tunisian desert and Arab Youssef (Ethan Kai) is standing over him with orders to urinate on him.  But as awful as Victor’s situation is, Azouz is as interested in absurdity as he is atrocity.  For a start, Yousef is Victor’s best friend. 
“When I was reading memoirs from the camps in Tunisia, the Nazis had names like Grandma and Little Feller and Memento. It was their nicknames coupled with the landscape — mountains and deserts full of cacti — that made me think of a Western. That’s sort of where the title came from,” explains Azouz alluding to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti classic Once Upon a Time in the West.  
However it is not only the landscape that sets this story apart from most other Nazi occupation dramas.  There is, says Azouz, something funny about it too. “People being buried up to their neck is barbaric. But then I would read [while researching the play] that the Nazis would have to keep rotating the Arab guards because they were getting too friendly with the Jews.  And because the Nazis had names like Grandma, there was something very sort of surreal and silly about it. It was horrific but this was not the mechanical or methodical horror of Europe. It was much more wild.  These Nazis were losing their heads in the desert. There was something of a mirage about it;  something much more haphazard and much more uncertain.”
There was also yet another difference, one that perhaps more than all the others goes to the heart of the play. “The Arab population weren’t willing collaborators in the same way Europeans were,” says Azouz.  
In terms of their genocidal objective, the Nazis were most successful in countries where there was an infrastructure to support their objective of annihilating the Jews, Azouz points out. 
“Fundamentally the Arab nations in North Africa were not seduced by the Nazis in the same way [as the Europeans].”
But although the play’s territory — thematically and geographically — feels distinctive, when you look at Azouz’s background it is also a natural next step.  Sephardi on both sides of his family, he went to JFS and after studying anthropology at university went to the Philippe Gaulier School in Paris because he “really liked Sasha Baron Cohen [who studied there] and I thought I wanted to be a clown.”  
He then explored being a theatre director. But it was after penning the The Mikvah Project that he seriously began to think of himself as a writer, a discipline he also honed as a member of the Muslim and Jewish theatre group MUJU at the Tricycle Theatre (now Kiln Theatre). 
Yet he resists the idea that his new play which “allows us to spend time with Muslim and Jewish characters and engage with their complexity” is motivated by politics.  “Once Upon A Time is not an attempt to bridge today’s divide to give a rose tinted view of Arab Jewish relations before. It doesn’t sanctify the relationships between Arab and Jews.  It wasn’t like it was so rosy before the Nazis.” 
So what then has driven him to write his latest play?  
“It’s more that I am British/Jewish and also aware that my grandparents spoke Arabic,” he says.  
His family have lived in Britain for a hundred years but two of his great grandmothers came from Iraq and Syria.  
“I suppose I’m just curious, really,” says Azouz.  “What was it like?” There was also a grandfather whose first language was Ladino and who arrived in Britain from Istanbul at the age of 12. 
But the point is, Azouz is not your state-of-the-nation playwright, responding David Hare-like to political events.  “I don’t get my ideas from reading the Guardian,” he says. “I don’t respond to headlines,” he adds. No, but if he’s not responding to world events there is the sense the world is echoing his plays. 
His three-hander Buggy Baby (2018) features a refugee couple from the Middle East whose attempt to live a normal life in Britain never succeeds in breaking with their violent past. Most writers might dwell on the bleak realism of such a subject. But Azouz is more interested in letting the imagination of anxiety fly like a nightmare.  The role of the couple’s baby  (played by an adult) doubles as a narrator and driven by the leaf drug khat the trio live in a hallucinogenic world.  One critic described the play as “surreal Harold Pinter.” 
Pressed a bit on his impulse as a writer Azouz puts some of it down to fear. The Mikvah Project, about two men who fall in love with each other came soon after he was married (he lives in Kilburn with his wife and two small children) while Buggy Baby, which features an abusive parent came out six months after the birth of his son.  And now Once Upon A Time… is going to première just three months after the last flare up between Israel and Hamas and, possibly just as another seems to be brewing.  
That said, talk of writing out of fear probably overstates the psychology of playwrighting. Or it least it does in Azouz’s case. 
“I’m really just trying to entertain the audience, first and foremost,” he says.  
Meanwhile he is surprisingly cool about the undeniable step up in his career of premiering  a play at the prestigious Almeida.  He is pleased about it but the business of putting on a play doesn’t change just because the stage is better known he points out. What with Covid he’s “just incredibly delighted to be in a rehearsal room.” 
“It’s a big step,” he finally concedes. “And if you ask me tomorrow I’ll probably feel really stressed.  But at the moment I’m enjoying it. It’s fun!”