The first five words of the Royal Court’s enquiry announced that a nettle had been avoided, not grasped. “The enquiry into Rare Earth Mettle…”, it began.
Its objective: to discover how a new play brimful of hot-button themes including global warming, indigenous rights and the West’s exploitation of a developing nation’s resources ended up perpetuating an antisemitic stereotype by naming its leading character, a non-Jewish
unfathomably rich, morally bankrupt tycoon, the specifically Jewish name of Hershel Fink.
The report’s assumption is that the problem lies in the theatre’s systems. Any long-held attitudes towards Jews at the theatre were apparently deemed irrelevant (more of which later).
With this narrowest possible focus the enquiry sets out the systemic failures that led to the use of an antisemitic trope up until complaints forced Hershel’s name to be changed to Henry Finn before opening night. The report’s suggested cure? More oversight.
In last week’s JC interview the theatre’s artistic director Vicky Featherstone (whose sincerity should not be doubted) was appalled to discover that “few Jewish artists have felt they can be ‘out’ about their Jewishness” while working at the Court. It is now hoped that works about and by Jews that are already in the pipeline will go some way to remedy this. Yet the Board’s enquiry makes no effort to explore what led to Jews feeling this way.
Preferring to stick to its chosen path it concludes that from now on at least one other director attached to the Royal Court, though not to the production, will have access to shows throughout development; staff will be given opportunities to “read and discuss programmed plays (or detailed synopses)” and “Jewish readers [will] continue to be represented” in the
freelance reading team who are often the first to set eyes on a playwright’s script. There will also be a new antisemitism dimension to the Royal Court’s anti-racism training.
But pity the playwrights who will work with what amounts to sensitivity readers on their shoulder. These well meaning foot soldiers of the commendable (and I don’t mean that sarcastically) inclusivity cause are rightly fighting for underrepresented voices. But there is already a history of cancelling artists deemed to be off-message - a new tyranny that artistic
directors seem powerless to oppose.
Old Vic staffers and a young artists’ group at the theatre reportedly cancelled director Terry Gilliam and his production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods for comments Gilliam made relating to #MeToo and other sensitive subjects.
An alternative venue for the show has since been found. But those who cancelled Gilliam presumably would have preferred the director’s living had been taken away because of comments they found offensive. Maximum punishment. Minimum process.
Meanwhile back at the Court forcing writers to write under this new Twitter-driven puritanism will turn a well-meaning response to antisemitism into an environment that is anti-art. Under these new conditions it is impossible to imagine the Court’s new guardians allowing the dialogue that energised Nina Raine’s terrific play Tribes (Royal Court 2010) in which the
patriarch of an argumentative family declares that deaf people (including his own son) “are the f***ing Muslims of the handicapped world.” More likely Raine would today either self-censor or choose not to write one of the Court’s best plays of this century.
All this and the enquiry still leaves unaddressed the wider question about the theatre’s historical attitude towards Jews who have been depicted as having an uncommon influence when it comes to bad things in the world. In 1987 Jim Allen’s Perdition (directed by Ken Loach) made the deeply dodgy, completely bonkers allegation that Jews collaborated with the Nazi
genocide of their own people to further Zionism.
More relevant to current manifestations of antisemitism is Caryl Churchill’s 2009 work Seven Jewish Children. Written as a ten minute rapid response to the terrible death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in their war with Hamas in 2008-2009, Churchill’s play imagines how
Jewish parents might protect their children from frightening realities. First
it is the Holocaust - “Don’t tell her they were killed”. Minutes later it is Palestinian suffering,
showing that victims have becoming perpetrators.“...tell her we are chosen people. tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is
happy it’s not her.”
Perhaps Churchill came across such comments by a Jewish parent. But as it exists in her play it is not an individual’s comment, rather one can easily be taken as representing all Jews.
In this way the play perpetuates the usually antisemitic prejudice of suggesting that an entire people are complicit with the actions of a state. I say usually because in the wake of Trump’s pronouncements about the “China virus” there was a marked spike in attacks against Asians in America at the height of the pandemic. But there are few other examples – if any - of a
race or religion being held responsible for a government’s policy regardless of
the country they live in.
My own relatively mild version of the discomfort felt by Jewish practitioners at the Court (other than watching Churchill’s play) happened at a party. Someone who I considered a good acquaintance if not quite a friend, and who it appears did not know I was Jewish, was holding ‘court’ (sorry) about her recent work trip to Israel and Palestine. Angry about the way she had
been treated by the Israeli authorities, and the way Palestinians are treated,
she was now “resisting the temptation to be antisemitic”, she announced. Others nodded. They too understood the temptation.
My waffling response was that it would surely be as wrong to randomly link Jews to Israeli policy as it would Muslims to the actions of Muslim countries or individual Britons to the massive number of civilian deaths resulting from the invasion of Iraq. Tumbleweed.
My guess is that she and the nodders would have appreciated Seven Jewish Children. Although in 2009 not everyone at the Court did which is why a whistleblower, aghast at the play’s content, sent me a draft before opening night.
Fast forward 13 years and the Royal Court sees nothing in their past that is worth including in their enquiry about antisemitism. It can only be hoped that the theatre’s Board realises that by portraying Jews as powerful influencers behind some of the worst events the world as some of their past plays have done, results in a convoy of cars driving up Finchley Road threatening Jewish girls with rape.
I can see the problem. Churchill is rightly revered as one of our finest living dramatists and
is part of the theatre’s DNA. For the theatre to criticise one of her works would be akin to the Tory party having a go at the queen. I don’t suggest the play’s antisemitism extends to Churchill herself by the way, even though her criticism of Israel extends to me as a Jewish parent and assumes I want justice for Palestinians less than she does.
Today the Court is attempting to draw a line under that past, albeit without looking back at it. Perhaps Jews will feel more comfortable within its walls in future. My worry is that the line also heralds an era of playwrights being overseen by focus group and whose priority is
anything but creating the best possible play.
