At the end of 2021, how many of us would have predicted the following? That, from the stage of the Royal Court theatre, an actor would invite the audience to mark the recent festival of Rosh Hashanah by joining the company for a slice of honey cake, before wishing all those present a shana tova u’metuka?
That the same venue would host a charity fundraiser for Jewish Care, consisting of the legendary Lenny Beige singing the songs of the “Jewish Elvis”, Neil Diamond, as channelled by the actor Steve Furst? Or that, on that same Royal Court stage, Deborah Lipstadt, famed as the woman who stood up to Holocaust denier David Irving and won, and who now serves as Joe Biden’s special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, would have a closed-door, late night conversation with a group of British Jews, as they shared stories and reflections over a delicious selection of Baghdadi Jewish pastries?
Not me, that’s for sure. And yet this last month, when the calendar was already brimming with holy days and festivities, there was a series of rather joyous Jewish happenings in a corner of Sloane Square that would once have seemed almost comically improbable. The prompt was Jews. In Their Own Words, which will have its final performance at the Royal Court this weekend.
Plenty of JC readers will already know much of the background to this show but, by way of a catch-up, here goes. Actor Tracy-Ann Oberman had long been in discussion with the theatre about commissioning and staging a play on left antisemitism. That discussion became urgent a year ago, when it emerged that the theatre was poised to stage a new work centred on a corrupt, manipulative billionaire called Hershel Fink.
Relations between the Royal Court and the Jewish community had been strained for decades — look up Seven Jewish Children and Perdition and you’ll see why — and Hershel Fink added to that tension. Together with Tracy, the Court’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, approached me about crafting a play — a verbatim piece formed out of interviews with 12 British Jews. Some famous (Howard Jacobson, Margaret Hodge, Luciana Berger, Tracy herself), some not (a doctor, a social worker, a decorator and so on).
For someone who had never written for the theatre before, the whole thing has been a dizzying, thrilling experience. From the moment I pressed “record” on the first of those dozen interviews, there has been a special intensity to this project. That’s been true for those involved but also, it seems, for those who have come to see the show.
I’ve lost count of the number of messages I’ve received using the word “cathartic”. So many Jews found it a tremendous relief to see the story of their own lives reflected back to them on a London stage (and especially on that London stage). One wrote to say he’d been surprised by how emotional he’d become seeing it: “I think that was down to the realisation that personal experiences were actually shared experiences.”
I’ve seen that response played out in front of me, night after night. After each performance, in the foyer or in the bar, you would find clusters of Jews trading their own stories of antisemitism. After the very first performance, I was summoned over to a group of older women — lifelong friends — as one of them told how at the age of 11, the girl she had thought of as her best friend had called her a “dirty Jew.” It had been a momentary outburst, but this woman had carried that childhood humiliation around with her for six or seven decades, only now telling her closest friends. And stories like that one kept coming.
Many would lament that they had seen so many of their fellow Jews in the audience: “The people who need to see this show are not here,” they’d say. As it happens, I’m not so sure about that. I frequently heard from non-Jews who saw the play and liked it, who said it had allowed them to understand the history and impact of antisemitism as never before. Tellingly, perhaps, they tended to tell me with a text message rather than a tweet: my guess is that they did not want the grief that would inevitably come if they went public.
But even if the audience was heavily Jewish, I can live with that. From what people have told me, it meant a great deal for British Jews to have their experiences taken seriously, for those experiences not to be doubted or challenged but just heard. During that late-night encounter with Lipstadt (see page 4) — who had asked to see the play and meet those involved, both actors and interviewees — Anthony Julius, Lipstadt’s defender in the Irving trial, said something that will stay with me. He called the play a new form of “Jewish witness”, with Jews at last allowed to testify to the truth of their lives.
But the significance of what happened these last few weeks is not confined to Jews. There’s been a lot written about this play, but perhaps my favourite observation came in the Economist. It remarked that in an age of culture wars, when accusations of prejudice are often greeted by a cramped, bureaucratic response, with bitter deadlock the most common outcome, this venture represented something unusual: self-examination by the Royal Court and, at the same time, a willingness among the Jews who took part to take a risk.
As the magazine put it: “It relies on humane attitudes that have come to seem rare: a presumption of goodwill, or to put it another way, trust — from the theatre, Mr Freedland, the interviewees, actors and audience — plus a faith that, if their errors are explained, people can choose to do better.”
That is the lesson of hope that I choose to draw from this whole experience. Often, as a community, we can feel besieged, convinced that those who have hurt us are destined to remain our adversaries always and forever. But sometimes people do move and attitudes do shift. Every now and then, change can happen.
‘Jews. In Their Own Words’ runs at the Royal Court until October 22
