‘It’s right and proper that Jews play Jews’ says Elliot Levey as he prepares for his role in a new production of Good

It all seems a long way off from the ambivalence Levey once felt about being typecast as an actor who plays Jews. In fact, there are more non-Jews on his CV, such as Bishop Cauchon in Saint Joan at the Donmar Warehouse, Robespierre in Danton’s Death at the National Theatre and Lord Burleigh in Mary Stuart in the West End. But even here he suspects casting directors often saw in his Jewishness a something-of-the-night quality that goes with dark untrustworthiness.

However, things have changed for Levey when it comes to playing Jews. He feels no ambivalence’ at all about playing the title role in an upcoming revival of Patrick Marber’s Jewish play Howard Katz, which will be Levey’s third Jew on the trot.

“Identity politics have transformed acting,” he says. “Suddenly we’re in a whole new world where we are interested in authenticity. It is right and proper, I would say, that Jews play Jews. My golden rule always is, if the minority being portrayed buy it, the job’s a good ’un.”

His current Jew, Maurice in Good, may be the most demanding.

Director Dominic Cooke (formerly of the Royal Court, where he directed the notorious Seven Jewish Children) has turned the play into a three-hander (with Sharon Small playing the wife of Tennant’s Halder). Normally there are 13 actors plus musicians in a production of Good.

This one sees Small and Levey play multiple roles. Their characters are conjured by the mind of Halder as he involuntarily recalls his journey from being a sensitive academic with a love of literature whose best friend is Jewish, to a participator in Kristallnacht and then at Adolf Eichmann’s behest, getting a job at Auschwitz, dealing — chillingly — with overcrowding.

All this means that Levey has to play the roles of Nazis — Eichmann and the high-ranking Philipp Bouhler — as well as the play’s Jew.
In the room where the cast are being fitted for costumes, there is an SS Nazi leather trenchcoat waiting for one of the men to try on. For Levey, art about the Holocaust is only worth doing if the piece is worthy.

“To address the attempted destruction of European Jewry in any way which diminishes it is the closest thing I can imagine of to a sin,” he says.

“I don’t believe in God but there’s something sinful about it. If you’re doing a play on this subject, or you’re writing a book about it, my God it’s got to be better than good.”

For preparation the cast have been watching Claude Lanzmann’s testimonial epic Shoah. It is, says Levey a way of “cleansing the palate” of all the unpalatable Holocaust works of art that have become a cottage industry. Does he have any in mind? There are many, he says. And then he comes up with one.

“I’m talking about that horrible one with a kid, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I mean, to me I want to haul that guy over the coals because it’s lazy, bad literature and it’s an appalling film. I’m not interested in a writer looking at a blank page or a blank screen and going ‘What about this as a subject?’”

CP Taylor, by contrast, was writing from a very different perspective. In the foreword to his play he wrote, “I grew up during the war under a deeply felt anxiety that the Germans might win, overrun Britain and that I, and my mother and father would end up, like my less fortunate co-religionists in a Nazi death camp — perhaps specially built in Scotland or England.”

“It’s really intense stuff,” says Levey of the play.

“We don’t know enough about Taylor because he died at 52. He was a Glaswegian working-class Jew and was really prolific. But this was his big hit. And my God it’s good.”

Good opens this week and is at
the Harold Pinter Theatre until December 24
goodtheplay.com