So-called “black out nights” are the latest trend in theatre to send waves of controversy rippling through the Twittersphere. The idea, an American import, is that specific nights during a run of a black orientated play are designated for black-only audiences.
Met by criticism and veneration in equal measure, the goal is to foster a safe space where black audiences can freely engage in art ostensibly unique to them. So could a “Jews-only night” at the theatre loom?
On paper it makes some sense. The underlying principle seems applicable to us, as an ethnic minority that doesn’t have an easy history with theatre in this country: a Jewish audience in a Jewish space for a Jewish show where we can freely engage in Jewish themes. The website for Tambo & Bones, the play at the heart of the recent brouhaha, advertises its “black out night” as “free from the white gaze”. Perhaps we could finally be liberated from the goyim’s gaze.
A “Jews-only night” would,of course, be different from all other nights. On a practical level, you would probably know half the audience. But there is something deeper and fundamentally uncomfortable about the prospect. The principle behind it misunderstands art’s emotional and ethical power. It leaves us culturally poorer.
Good art is mystical. It has an uncanny ability to illuminate a perspective other than our own. We can open a window to another time, another culture, another world, and smell the fresh air that wafts through as if we were there experiencing it for ourselves. This vicariousness broadens out horizons in a way nothing else can.
I am not a bored heiress, but I have felt what it is to walk London streets as Mrs Dalloway. I am not a manic-depressive amid a midlife crisis, yet I have felt what it is to be swallowed into irrelevance by a paradigm shift in 19th-century Russian society alongside Uncle Vanya.
Content in art rarely matters here. It is what is beyond the immediately visible that counts. It is why I have a kinship with Vanya and his suffering, despite our many differences. Fiddler On The Roof better illustrates this. It looks like the quintessential Jewish story of the ebbs and flows of shtetl life; it would probably be a prime candidate for our “Jews-only night”, but despite the surface-level cultural and geographical distances, Fiddler is unexpectedly popular in Japan.
The Japanese might just be partial to a catchy Broadway tune. But it’s more fundamental. Fiddler is a story of familial duty and balancing the burden of tradition as the next generation takes the reins, concepts that carry as much weight in Japanese culture as they do in our own. Fiddler becomes a glorious bridge between two worlds that may have otherwise remained on separate banks of the river. All good art has this power.
The idea of a “Jews-only night”, cackhandedly demarcating a “safe space”, misunderstands art’s magic. Even if for just one night, it would deny a precious opportunity to celebrate sharing our experiences, our worlds, our lives, with others. Instead, it would stand for the opposite. It would want to keep us ghettoised, ossifying boundaries with a patronising finger wag instead of knocking them down.
Jews particularly have a duty to share our art. Ignorance about Jewish culture still pervades. It’s not just a lack of knowledge, but a lack of emotional understanding. History books cannot breach the latter, only art can achieve that. Simon Schama can tell us about the history of the Jews. Chagall can show us.
I admit there are caveats. The iconoclastic naughtiness and giddy titillation that electrifies me when I read Philip Roth may not be as available for non-Jews unversed in the idiosyncrasies of diaspora Jewish neuroses. And yet there are universal gems of human experience waiting to be mined on each page by anyone who wants to pick up his books. That goes for all great art, whenever it comes from.
At university, I lent a non-Jewish friend my copy of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. She returned it two weeks later scarred with coffee stains and with its spine as wrinkled as an old leather armchair. Pages were warped as if they had melted under the radioactive heat of her gaze. She had read it twice and had seen the unseeable. She looked into my soul. I wanted to cry.
So if there’s ever such thing as a “Jews-only night”, I’ll kindly decline. Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to go to a theatre that would have me in that audience.
Alexander Cohen is a theatre and opera critic
