I’m not sure what’s worse, the offence or the apology. This week the Royal Court theatre was accused by, among others, producer Adam Lenson and David Baddiel of perpetuating an antisemitic stereotype in its new play Rare Earth Mettle by giving a fictional Silicon Valley billionaire baddie the Jewish name Hershel Fink.

The Court’s early response was that the character was not Jewish and neither was the name Hershel Fink, as far as they and the play’s author Al Smith were aware.

There are two questions to deal with here before getting to the nub of this. The first: How narrow does your cultural life have to be to not realise that both Hershel and Fink are Jewish names, even before you put them together?

The second concerns the Court’s later, more considered, apology, couched in the self-aggrandising language of those who are on a journey of “learning”. It is this willingness to learn, we are invited to conclude, that has resulted in the character’s name being quickly changed (to Henry Finn) and which has exposed “unconscious bias” when it comes to Jews.

You would blink at this statement even if it came from Yorkshire Cricket Club. But the Court is among the most woke institutions on the cultural landscape. The politics of race and an awareness of dangerous racist tropes are at the centre of its identity. For them to miss one of the deadliest racial slurs of all — the money-motivated Jew who profits from the harm he does to the world — is an open-and-shut case of “you had one job”. The phrase “unconscious bias” is haunting. When the Court begins to “reflect deeply” (their words) they might find it difficult to differentiate between unconscious bias and unstated bias — the kind that is quietly understood to be held by one’s peers and so needs little affirmation out loud.

Smith’s play would have been closely read by at least the literary manager, the artistic director, the director, the cast and possibly people in the communications department. Yet not a peep it seems about Fink. There are many who intuit that the Hershel Fink row is symptomatic of something more than a single event. A culture, perhaps.

The shame of it is that the whole affair casts a shadow over a production that will have much to say on matters that have nothing to do with Jews. But where, one can’t help but ask, does this admitted unconscious bias stop?

Had Fink always been called Finn it would never have occurred to anyone to check for tropes in Arthur Darvill’s performance in the role. It will be hard not to now. In the Court’s video teaser for the play, the billionaire formerly known as Fink doesn’t speak with the steady, languid drawl of Elon Musk to whom the character has been compared (they are both CEO of an electric car company). He is more pugnacious than that. He is fast-talking, aggressive and intimidating. You might say there’s a bit Weinstein here, a bit of Zuckerberg there. This is all deeply unfair on Darvill.

It seems British theatre as a whole has been interested in antisemitism recently. I have wondered if this is in part a subliminal response to the recent rise of antisemitism on the left. Antisemitism is there in Paula Vogel’s Indecent at the Chocolate Factory, which followed hard on the heels of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt in the West End, as did Josh Azouz’s Once Upon a Time In Nazi-Occupied Tunisia and Cordelia Lynn’s Love and Other Acts of Violence at the Donmar.

There has been nothing at the Court, which is completely fine. Although there was Nina Raine’s Tribes (2010), which featured a family who were incidentally Jewish, an admirable example of unconscious un-bias, the holy grail when it comes to depicting minorities on stage.

In terms of new plays, there was not much before Tribes except Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (2009), which for me is still the most — probably only — egregiously antisemitic play produced by a major production house in the UK during the two decades I have been reviewing.

It was written as a 10-minute rapid response to the terrible death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas in 2008-9. What was so difficult about the piece was not its attack on Israel, nor its empathy for Palestinians, but its depiction of Jews as Holocaust victims and then, ten minutes later, as bloodthirsty perpetrators of atrocity.

I still feel the shock of seeing myself represented on that stage as merciless and murderous. The work is still on the Court’s website along with its description “a history of Israel”, which is odd, given that the play’s title is not Seven Israeli Children. It is difficult not to link the two controversies and wonder if the most recent is less about the name of one character in one play and more about a culture.