Royal Court Exclusive: Jonathan Freedland and Vicky Featherstone on their new play about antisemitism

Freedland’s new work is mainly constructed from artfully compiled and edited transcripts from his interviews with Jews who have experienced prejudice,.

But the idea behind the play was Tracy-Ann Oberman’s. She is best known for her starring roles in Doctor Who, Eastenders and Friday Night Dinner, but when Corbyn happened, she become an expert in fighting antisemites on Twitter, in print and on her podcast, Trolled.
Because she and Vicky Featherstone the Court’s artistic director knew each other from studying drama at Manchester University in the mid-1980s they sat down to discuss the possibility of a play about English left-wing antisemitism.

But the subject had also separately come up in Featherstone’s meetings with the Royal Court’s board of directors. “I was always, ‘Yes we should. But it’s such a massive subject I don’t know how,’” she says during a break from rehearsals.

Some interviewees are famous, others just ordinary Jews. They range from Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson to unknown Jews such as London painter and decorator Phillip Abrahams.

Also present are former Labour MP Luciana Berger, current Labour grandee Dame Margaret Hodge, and Oberman herself. All are played by the production’s ensemble cast of Jewish actors, which includes Debbie Chazen, Steve Furst and Alex Waldmann.

Significantly, the play, Freedland’s first, is co-directed by Featherstone, who commissioned the work, and Jewish director Audrey Sheffield.

It premieres in the wake of Freedland’s latest book The Escape Artist, about a Jew who escaped from Auschwitz. However, the new work addresses a very different form of antisemitism.

“The question it wrestles with, if not answers, is how does it happen that enlightened liberal, avowedly anti-racist organisations across the liberal cultural left, from universities to the theatre, to the media to the Labour Party, somehow succumb to this particular ancient prejudice?” Freedland told me when the project was announced earlier this year.

And indeed the play tackles a variety of ways in which antisemitism has been experienced, in the workplace, on the streets and, of course, online.

For many, the news of the play when it was announced immediately raised the question of how or whether the Royal Court — itself an “avowedly anti-racist organisation” that has apologised for antisemitism — will address its own record.

I can reveal here that Freedland’s play does indeed cover two of the Court’s home-grown controversies, both of which attracted bitter accusations of antisemitism.

The most recent is the Hershel Fink affair. The character in Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle was renamed at the eleventh hour.

The other is the 2009 play Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, the most revered of Royal Court playwrights. Publicised as a rapid-response play to the many Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas in 2008-9, the short work’s content and its title implied all Jews were complicit in the deaths.

It would be a spoiler to reveal here how Seven Jewish Children and especially the Hershel Fink affair are tackled in Freedland’s play. But, he says, it is a brave thing for the Court and Featherstone to invite him to write about a subject when the theatre itself is no innocent bystander.

To describe the Court’s relationship to Jews as conflicted feels like a euphemism, especially in today’s fevered intolerance of insensitivity towards minorities. But in eras before now it was possible to argue that causing offence is what comes with shifting someone’s world view simply by putting on a play.

Everyone will have their list but Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park; Conor McPherson’s The Weir; Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Cleansed and 4:48 Psychosis; Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and A Number; Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good; Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which knocked the theatre establishment off its pedestal by putting the ironing board centre stage, all qualify.

Yet in a place that prides itself on sweeping aside old conventions, how is it, Freedland’s play asks, that notions of the Jew being uniquely untrustworthy prevail, so much so that they collaborated in their own genocide (Jim Allen’s Perdition); that unlike any other race or religion they are all — not even mostly — complicit in the actions of a state (Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children) and that more than any other group they profit from doing bad things to the world (Hershel Fink).

Freedland’s play coolly examines such slurs while highlighting how Jewish theatre practitioners have often felt better off hiding their Jewishness rather than revealing it.

On this there is a moment in the play when Oberman gives a beautifully succinct insight into what it is to be an actor whose Jewishness elicits questions from her peers about Israel, and what happens if the answers are not as required. You are “never quite loved in the same way again,” she says.

Yet among the most pressing question put by Jews. In Their Own Words . is how did such notions become so fabulously enduring?

So as well as the modern voices expect flashbacks to one of England’s earliest inventions and exports — the blood libel, much of it guided by the words of Dave Rich, the Community Security Trust’s Director of Policy, one of Freedland’s interviewees.

Did Freedland detect any anxiety about including examples of antisemitism attributed to the Royal Court?

“If there had been anxiety it would have been on the part of the Royal Court,” he says, having just cycled through the traffic of the Holloway Road to get to the rehearsal space. Clearly he is not risk-averse.

“My approach all the way through was, ‘they have made this very brave move by asking me to do it. So now I’m gonna do it.’ I wasn’t then thinking about what will spare their blushes.

“There’s a whole very substantial chunk on Seven Jewish Children and in my mind, you could never not go there. If it fitted I would have put Perdition in there as well.”

This is Freedland’s first stage work and the theatrical form of verbatim well suits the skills he would have honed as one of our most accomplished journalists, authors and broadcasters.

But what makes him such a good fit for the subject is that he has no axe to grind about the Court’s politics. “My view of it was, like many of the other culturally liberal-slash-left institutions, this was one where my kind of political sympathies would be with them.

“And yet [I had] an awareness that there was this kind of historic blind spot when it came to Jews.

“You know, I travel in that world, I’m one of those people who was familiar with, for example, antisemitism in the Labour Party long before it was fashionable,” he says with a chuckle. “In the 80s and 90s,if you were swimming in this water, none of this was news to you.

“Similarly, with universities or liberal newspapers or the theatre —you just know that [antisemitism exists there] for all the reasons that I hope we shine a light on in this play.”

All this explains why when the Hershel Fink story broke, Freedland’s response was less outrage and more “here we go again”.

Hershel was the trigger that prompted Featherstone to commission the play. At last it became clear how to approach a play about antisemitism.

Up until then the Royal Court’s modus operandi, which is to be led by what a writer wants to write, had always inhibited Featherstone from imposing the subject on a playwright.

“But that’s where the verbatim form comes in,” explains Featherstone, after a morning transferring Freedland’s work from page to stage. “Verbatim has been at the Royal Court for a long time so you do feel you can say to a writer, ‘Take this subject, oversee and edit it.’”

It was Oberman’s idea to approach Freedland, though fear of more antisemitic attacks has prevented her from playing herself.

Instead she can be found in Bath where she will open in the classic comedy Noises Off on the same day as Jews. In Their Own Words. opens in London.

For Featherstone the whole Hershel Fink episode and the work that she has done with Freedland has been something of a traumatic awakening.

“It’s really shocked me, how many people have said to me ‘I don’t feel I can be out and Jewish in the theatre world’ or in many of the worlds that people work in,” she says.

And when it comes to the Hershel Fink affair itself the artistic director is the first in the Royal Court’s history to accept that antisemitism is a problem in the theatre.

“I think the fact that we didn’t realise what that name was, and we had no understanding of the impact of it, is absolutely antisemitic with a capital ‘A’,” she says.

As for what she hopes Freedland’s play achieves, more understanding would be a good start, she says.

“The conversation with Tracy became more acute when she witnessed and experienced a rise in antisemitic attacks [and] the entrenchment of what that is in the Labour Party and in other areas of the left where she would least expect it. But what you want from a play is a massive question. What you want is empathy.”

“I think it’s an amazing moment of theatre,” says Oberman on the phone from Bath.

“Because the Royal Court has never felt like a safe home.

“It’s the most progressive and left-wing theatre institution that has never felt like a particularly safe place because of its clear [yet] hidden prejudice.

“And hopefully the very fact that these voices are going to be heard there in this play in this way, even for one night, is I think is a pretty momentous occasion.”

Jews. In Their Own Words. is at the Royal Court from September 20 to October 22 royalcourttheatre.com