Why the arts world must not cancel Caryl Churchill

The saga of Hershel Fink never seems to end. No one is well served by the long half-life of this plague on the Royal Court theatre. The theatre, you will recall, gave an Ashkenazi Jewish name to the character of an avaricious, manipulative billionaire; claimed the mistake was due only to “unconscious bias”; then was found to have twice ignored direct warnings that the name was Jewish and the context antisemitic.

None of this is fun to rehash. Not for the theatre, which has worked hard to learn and move on. Not for those of us who have chronicled the story, for whom it is depressing, circular and rhythmically punctuated by the refusal of Gentile theatremakers to take it seriously. Nor for several people actually called Hershel or Herschel Fink, each of whom is, naturally, Jewish.

Now, some supporters of the playwright Caryl Churchill seem to blame the theatre for her loss of the European Drama Award.

Churchill was to be awarded the prize by a prestigious German body this year. Instead, the jury issued a statement saying that it had “become aware of the author’s signatures in support of boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS]. The play Seven Jewish Children can also be regarded as being antisemitic. Therefore, to our great regret, the jury has decided not to confer the prize this year.”

Caryl Churchill GettyImages-80271737

Caryl Churchill

The jury’s statement was spectacularly unhelpful in blurring two distinct issues: Churchill’s support for BDS and the separate criticism made by many Jews of Seven Jewish Children, a play staged at the Royal Court in 2009 which is regularly cited as a precursor to the Hershel Fink debacle. Churchill denies that its focus on the death of Palestinian children constitutes a rehash of the “blood libel” against Jewish people. But the engine of the play is its demand that Jews across the world take responsibility for the actions of Israel, a painfully pervasive antisemitic trope given added heat by its strong implication that Jewish parents should confess a collective guilt to their own children.

Writing to The Stage newspaper in Churchill’s defence, the playwright Wallace Shawn positioned the loss of Churchill’s award in the context of the Royal Court’s decision to stage Jews. In Their Own Words, a verbatim play which included some reflection on its own mistakes. The play, crafted from interviews by JC columnist Jonathan Freedland, briefly quoted the trauma memories of Jewish audience members on watching Seven Jewish Children. To Shawn, this brief testimony to Jewish experience meant “the theatre’s apology had apparently evolved into a denunciation of one of its own authors.”

Many theatremakers I speak to have made a further link between this “denunciation” and Churchill’s loss of her award.

As Stephen Pollard wrote on the JC’s website last week, the German context of the jury’s decision has been widely lost in the consequent outrage from British artists. In 2019, the German Bundestag officially labelled BDS as an antisemitic movement. For a German jury to award a prize to a supporter of BDS would be to indicate a disregard for legal norms about what is and isn’t classed as antisemitism.

But I disagree with Stephen that Churchill’s loss of the award is something to celebrate. Like Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin or even John Donne, Churchill has elsewhere created art of magnitude and meaning. She understands that theatre is a poetic form: works like A Number, The Skriker or Blue Heart are textured experiments in language that layer their meanings like polyphonic music.

The ranting lowlights — Pigs and Dogs, which blamed the British Empire wholesale for homophobia across the developed world, or the “indulgent and leaden” Civil War play A Light Shining In Buckinghamshire — do not detract from those highlights. Nor should her politics, or even her personal sins.

We are at a moment of cultural history in which the left regularly dismisses the entire body of an artist’s work because their politics do not align with ours; or because they are perceived as racist, sexist or otherwise culpable for pain experienced by minorities groups. We have seen Kipling, Larkin or even Donne “cancelled”.

In the case of Kipling or Larkin, the charges levelled are real and substantive. But we cannot pretend that their art is without power or subtlety.

If only the literary left was as forgiving of other writers’ sins as it has been of Caryl Churchill. Critics who have lined up to ban other books have queued up to express their support for Churchill. Many applauded a boycott just this week of a theatre staging Miss Saigon.

The hypocrisy continues to astound. In his letter to The Stage, Wallace Shawn wrote of Jews. In Their Own Words that “sometimes apologies can be more brutal and harmful than the original offence.” But the play simply quoted Jews saying they’d felt under attack. Suggest in any other context that it is worse to acknowledge a minority’s feelings of racism than it is to actually cause those feelings and the progressive left — rightly — will bite your head off.

The Royal Court, to its credit, has stood firm. Old friends have queued up to denounce it. But they are not responsible for losing Caryl Churchill her prize. Her leftist supporters, meanwhile, should reflect on why their zeal for cancellations is reserved only for writers who offend groups other than Jews.