On 16 November, Keir Starmer gave an address at the Labour Friends of Israel lunch. He spoke of his determination to tackle antisemitism, singling out for praise David Baddiel’s recent book, Jews Don’t Count, “which demonstrates so clearly how racism against Jews is held to a different standard from other kinds of racism.” For the left-wing commentator Owen Jones, this was a red rag to a bull. Jones took to Twitter, accusing the Labour leader of “suggesting Black people or other people of colour are privileged when it comes to racism”. Corbynite Twitter took up the bait. Soon, the hashtag #Baddiel was trending, with the Jewish comedian and author accused spuriously of “anti-blackness”, “transphobia”, and of an insufficient leftist track-record to have earned the right to complain about his own experience of racism.
I watched the Twitter flames rage around David Baddiel with quiet frustration. Because that same weekend, I was working on a story for the Sunday Times which exemplified the truth of Baddiel’s thesis: that in Britain’s progressive institutions, increasingly dominated by “people fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia, and particularly, racism”, right-on people are failing to recognise Jewish people as a vulnerable minority and wilfully turning a blind eye to racism against Jews.
The Royal Court Theatre, despite its Sloane Square environs, has since the 1950s been the recognised headquarters of the political left in British theatre. Early this month, a group of Jewish theatremakers, led by the musicals specialist Adam Lenson, pointed out online that pre-publicity for the theatre’s upcoming play Rare Earth Mettle foregrounded a “messianic” billionaire seeking to acquire and control the earth’s mineral resources. His name was Hershel Fink; he was played by the actor Arthur Darvill, who became famous in Doctor Who for playing a character who was mocked for the size of his nose.
The Royal Court issued a panicked tweet assuring audiences that the character was not intended to be Jewish, that the choice of a Jewish name reflected only “unconscious bias”, and changing the name forthwith to Henry Finn. A better statement followed the next day, promising a period of reflection and committing to listening to the concerns of the Jewish community.
But when I began to investigate, I found a twist. The Court, renowned for the years it spends working carefully with contemporary playwrights, had been developing the script of Rare Earth Mettle since at least 2016. At that stage, playwright Al Smith had written his power-hungry billionaire as a Mexican-American character, whose sin was his willingness to exploit Latin Americans in a continent his immigrant mother had left behind her.
For some reason, perhaps indeed an “unconscious” association of Jewish names and wealthy puppet-masters, this ‘Chicano’ character was by then already named ‘Hershel Fink’. But somewhere along the line, it was decided that a Hispanic anti-hero in a play written and directed by two white men would be ‘problematic’. An early script passed to me shows a deep concern to respect ‘authentic’ casting for Latin-American actors: the cast list insists that “the Bolivians… should be of indigenous Aymaran heritage.’ It then continues, with unintentional hilarity, ‘Hershel Fink should be of Chicano heritage”.
The Royal Court, by its own admission to me, then spent hours working with consultants on Bolivian culture to assess how to sensitively portray an indigenous community torn over whether to sell its mineral-rich land. (In the final production, admittedly, these characters were played by Hispanic and black actors; British-based actors of genuine Aymaran heritage turned out to be thin on the ground.) Rather than portray a negative Mexican-American character, ‘Hershel Fink’ became ‘white’.
But nowhere during this lengthy ‘sensitivity’ process did anyone at the Royal Court seem to stop and wonder if the ‘sensitivities’ of Jewish people might also merit reflection.
At least one warning was directly ignored. During my investigation, I found that a young Jewish theatre director had raised concerns during an official Royal Court workshop led by Hamish Pirie, the director of Rare Earth Mettle, an Associate Director at the Royal Court and a longstanding director of left-wing plays at the venue. Pirie dismissed the concern and did not pass it on to the writer, Al Smith.
When I put this to Pirie and the theatre, they avoided giving me a formal answer until they knew my print deadline for the Sunday Times had passed. Then they rushed out a public statement admitting the incident, although not naming Pirie as the person concerned, between my filing and publication times. A classic attempt to get ahead of the story — but if we hadn’t investigated, would they have ever admitted that their bias was far from ‘unconscious’?
Pirie remains in a job. Would this be the case, I wonder, had he ignored a warning from a young black director about an anti-black stereotype?
Few incidents demonstrate so clearly the truth of Baddiel’s title: in leftwing theatre, Jews don’t count. I won’t hold my breath for the likes of Jones to admit it.
