Whether he is working on a drama or musical, multi award-winning stage director Bartlett Sher always has an eye for the political.

“I have a political nature with a small ‘p’” he admits when we meet in a rehearsal room in Belsize Park where he is drilling into shape The King and I, one of the biggest shows to arrive in London this year.

The production is one in an increasingly long line of Sher’s critically acclaimed musical revivals, including South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady.

However, his most political production of all was JT Rogers’ play Oslo, which lifted the lid on the doomed but daring Israeli/Palestinian secret peace negotiations of the 1990s. In the eyes of some, the play became a metaphor for the chasm that exits between modern political groups who hate each other’s guts: Republicans and Democrats in the Trump era, when it was running in New York; Remainers and Brexiteers when it was at London’s National Theatre last year.

“I grew up in the 60s and 70s in San Francisco. I was raised Catholic, my father was Jewish, and there were protests through the streets about the Vietnam War. I sat and watched my brothers in high school have their names drawn in a lottery to see if they would be drafted to Vietnam where our people were dying. The [militant group] Weathermen blew up our school’s church during a policeman’s funeral with all of us in school at the time. Harvey Milk [the gay rights campaigner]was my supervisor. So you couldn’t not have a view of what was going on in the world. It was a crazy place.”

Such radicalism seems a far cry from the somewhat dated classic The King and I, best remembered as the 1956 movie starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, but steeped in irrelevance for the way it conveys colonialist views of the far East — and women. The show is still banned in modern-day Siam, Thailand. But Sher’s version, which won four Tony awards in New York, upends those associations. Kelli O’Hara won a Tony for her Anna, the British English teacher who works for, and then falls for, the Siamese King. Her version of the real-life social reformer is a much more modern woman who, far from swooning at Ken Watanabe’s multiply married King, demands and expects equality.

“The King lived in a patrilineal society and maintained power through marriage,” says Sher. “But his country is shifting from one very traditional thing to another. This is something seen all over world. How do you navigate that?”

The route to doing the show was reasonably conventional. As a director at New York’s Lincoln Centre, Sher had successfully revived Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and Carousel.

“And I had done The King and I at high school and always loved the music and found it to be this profound thing.” But the way Oslo came into being was as unconventional as it gets.

“My daughter’s best friend at school has Norwegian parents, Terje [Rod-Larson] and Mona [Juul], the two negotiators. We would go to soccer matches and he would tell me stories of the Middle East peace process. And it sort of came out that he was involved...the more we talked about it, the more I thought ‘Holy Moses, this is amazing!’” So Sher introduced Rod-Larsen to Rogers. Most attempts to stage the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are written and performed from a particular point of view. But Oslo seems genuinely unbiased.

“Yeah, well I always wanted to do something about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict because it’s so impossible to talk about it without people getting all... insane. The talks were around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. All kind of world order issues were shifting, and you had great leaders. And those great leaders were Perez and Rabin. And to an extent Arafat. But particularly Rabin. He took the risk. And he paid for it. And he paid for it from his own side which is tragic.”

Does he lean towards one side or the other? No, at least not if his criteria for great drama is anything to go by. The story should not be about a conflict between right and wrong, but between “two rights.”

“It wouldn’t be a surprise that my politics are not conservative when it come to that subject,” says Sher.

“When it got to 1999, and Clinton had a different deal on the table, Arafat blew it. Because it was a great deal. He walked away from it and it was too bad.

“I’m not in favour of Oslo one way or another. I just wanted to tell the history. How do you get absolute mortal enemies in a room to talk?”

It’s hoped the play will go to Israel. Perhaps surprisingly it has received a lot of support from the United Arab Emirates, says Sher.

“They have been working on the subject for a long time, particularly to try to get the Palestinians to agree with each other. So I think it goes there too.”

“Israel is in a very politically complex place. It is dominated by its Right wing, its Left has been somewhat delegitimised, but is very strong. They face enormous obstacles and challenges and, I would say, need to rethink it.

“I think all you can do in the theatre is to inspire people to talk again, to know what the story was so that they go ‘You know what? Maybe we could do this again.’”

 

The King and I starts previews at the London Palladium on June 21

www.KingandIMusical.co.uk