I don’t know where you will be on the evening of October 7, but I bet my last Bamba puff it won’t be at the West End’s Gillian Lynne Theatre watching The Lehman Trilogy.
What was the National Theatre thinking when it decided to bring this play, which taps into every antisemitic trope you have ever heard about Jews and money, back to the London stage – and to stage one of the run’s performances on the anniversary of the biggest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust?
In reality, I don’t imagine it gave the matter much thought at all.
Would the National Theatre be so thoughtless about the sensitivities of any other British ethnic minority in a mildly analogous situation? Were there, say, a fêted play about the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, in which scores of people die of extreme heat, accidents and disease each year, would it show the work on the Day of Arafah? These are rhetorical questions, of course. We know the National Theatre would think very carefully indeed about these things. And imagine the uproar if it did not.
Uproar isn’t something one readily associates with the Jews, is it? One reason people don’t care about offending us is because they know our response to public offence is invariably measured. Diaspora Jews don’t demonstrate outside police headquarters, we don’t pull down statues and, on the rare occasions that we take to the streets, there is a noticeably peaceful air to proceedings. During last November’s march against antisemitism in central London, the look on the faces of the police standing along the route was mostly one of baffled boredom. When I asked one officer if she knew how many people had turned up, she seemed pleased to have something to do: she gave me a fulsome answer.
Put another way, people are not scared of physical attacks from Jews. We might feel furious about antisemitism but we remain furiously polite and pursue justice through the law. (Ever wondered why law is such a Jewish profession?) Or we write open letters to newspapers – or pen angry columns in them. (Ever wondered why journalism is such a Jewish profession?)
To be clear, I am not defending Lehman Brothers. Its conduct was indefensible. But it wasn’t the only bank involved in the crash of 2008, was it?
And yet Stefano Massini decided to write his multi award-winning play – in which we are reminded throughout that the brothers are Jewish and in which, at the end, they say kaddish over the bank – about this particular one. Funny that.
If it was a banking scandal that the Italian playwright was after, there’s a spectacular example in his own country’s history: the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982. Sex, death, organised crime and the Vatican Bank, all the ingredients for an enthralling piece of theatre are right there, Signor Massini.
But a play about Italian wealth and impropriety doesn’t pack the emotional punch of one about Jewish wealth and impropriety, does it? Of all the antisemitic ways of thinking about Jews that are sunk deep into the soil of civilisation, tropes about Jews and money are sunk deepest.
You would think, would you not, that the literary types who work at the National Theatre would be sensitive to this and that even as they defend the play as a literary work – and I’ve yet to read a critic who does not – they would understand that to stage it on October 7 is insensitive in the extreme. You’d expect them to understand that it is a date that is now seared into Jewish memory, a date that future generations will know just as the Jews today know when the destruction of the Second Temple took place. And you would expect them to understand that on the first anniversary of the massacre, in which more than 1,200 innocent people were butchered and hundreds taken hostage, the wound is especially fresh.
