What do Zionism and Irish nationalism have in common? Much more than many a Zionist and Irish nationalist might think, says Julia Pascal.
The writer and director has a new play. This one feels rather different from the many Pascal has created before including her Holocaust Trilogy of plays.
The Pascal canon has also reworked many classics —from Medea to The Dybbuk — often to investigate the Jewish condition over her decades-long career. Over that time the writer director, now 73, hasn’t changed much at all; not the curly hair nor the passion with which she talks about her work.
“I’m kind of high through exhaustion,” she says when we meet online early one morning before the resumption of rehearsals of her new play, which she also directs.
The play’s title, 12:37, takes its name from the exact time Jerusalem’s King David Hotel was bombed on July 22, 1946 by Zionists who were targeting the headquarters of British rule in Palestine.
One of the questions posed by the work is the relationship between Jews and the violence perpetrated by Jews. The play begins in 1930s Dublin with two Irish Jewish brothers grappling with the dilemma of whether to help their terminally ill father die as he has requested.
“My father’s family were Irish Jews who spoke very Dublin,” says Pascal. “I had this soundscape in my head all my childhood. It meant I found reading James Joyce’s Ulysses incredibly easy. It was for me how everybody spoke.”
This explains why 12:37 does not begin in Palestine, as most plays featuring events preceding Israel’s establishment might be expected to, but in the Irish capital with a young man spinning a coin a little like in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Only here the flipper is one of two Jews who are deciding who should be the one to kill their father.
“I remember my father told me how his father was dying of stomach cancer, and [because] they had morphine in the house the three brothers took a bet to decide who should give him a shot to put him out of his misery. So the play starts with that.”
This theme, about the justification for killing “in order to gain what we want” as Pascal puts it, runs through the play.
Though actually Pascal’s Irish family were more your Ben-Gurion socialist and not what she describes as the “right-wing” Jews whose mission was bound up in the nationalist movements of the 20th century, whether Irish, Serbian, Indian or Jewish.
“I see them all as completely linked,” says Pascal. “I don’t see Jewish history as something separate from the dynamic of the desire for nationalism."
The nationalists in her play, however, are not the kind who say “the land has belonged to us for 5,000 years as God promised” but “secular Jews like me who see Israel purely as a safe haven because because of the annihilation of Jews in the Second World War. It’s pragmatic.”
It is this perspective that drives Pascal’s play. The Jewish brothers in her play, Paul and Cecil, move from being Irish nationalists to Communists who fight the Battle of Cable Street in London.
But after the war the two are profoundly changed, becoming involved in the nationalist struggle for a Jewish homeland and — which is where the Irish and Jews had a similar objective — to “get rid of the British”.
“I have [in the past] met English Jews in London who swore me to secrecy and told me they’d been fighting against the British under the mandate.
"And this is an area that has percolated in my mind over years,” says Pascal. “Right -wing Jewish nationalists told me they were very much influenced by the Easter Rising and by [Irish revolutionary] Michael Collins in particular.
"Today, most Irish people I’ve met are very pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Even one of the actors [in Pascal’s play] is. We have interesting discussions about it.”
There is, says Pascal, “incredible ignorance” about Jews in this country. Against the background of rising antisemitism and the often simplistic arguments that drive it Pascal’s desire “is to show the complexity” of the Jewish relationship to Israel and to “explore the state’s birth through another lens”.
julia pascal credit yaron lapid
Julia Pascal (Photo: Yaron Lapid)
“The Irish actors I’m working with knew nothing about it and are learning an enormous amount,” says the director. It hasn’t always been an easy process. That ignorance about Jews that Pascal feared was widespread emerged even in the auditions for the play.
Pascal asked one actor how many Jews there were in the UK from a population of 60 million and the answer was 20 million. Another actor asked, “Shall I read the role ‘Jewish’?” Pascal asked what this meant and the actor did a Faginesque accent.
This is not the first play of Pascal’s to tackle Israel. Crossing Jerusalem (2003) takes a determinedly even-handed look at the Jewish and Palestinian relationship with the city, set against the second Intifada.
“That play was very much in the moment and set at a particular time. This one takes a much longer view from 1935 to 1948. It shows how people changed after the trauma of the Second World War and has a more epic timeframe.
“The new play is a much bigger piece and quite cinematic with big battle scenes. I mean, how do you blow up the King David Hotel on a tiny stage with five actors?”
Yet however different 12:37 is from Pascal’s previous works, the impulse to write it has not changed throughout her career, which began in earnest when she became the first woman to direct work at the National Theatre in 1978.
She visits family in Israel fairly regularly and her complex relationship with the Jewish state was forged as a teenager when her family moved there and enrolled her in, of all places, a Scottish missionary school.
“It was a complete catastrophe,” says Pascal.
“I was quite alone. My parents left my brother and me in Israel.
“But every time I visited the country it added a layer of knowledge about being a European Jew in Israel, and an understanding of the Middle Eastern Jew and the difference between our cultures. So Israel is a place of intense learning for me.”
All this has fed Pascal’s impulse to reveal the complexity of the Jewish experience.
“Because I can write I feel that it is my mission to make texts that reveal what I come across and then to share them,” says the director who, still high, signs off to return to the rehearsal room.
12:37 is at The Finborough Theatre from November 29 to December 21
finboroughtheatre.co.uk
