Opinion
Has Royal Court learnt nothing in the last 30 years?
Then, as now, the London theatre has shown that Jews do not count
November 25, 2021 12:23
4 min read
Then, as now, the London theatre has shown that Jews do not count
November 25, 2021 12:23January, 1987. As a young reporter at the Guardian, I’d just arrived in the office when my friend Roger Alton, the paper’s arts editor, thwacked a thick bound typescript on my desk. “Rose, you know your history,” he said (I had a degree in the subject from Oxford). “Take a look at this. I think it might be controversial.”
The typescript was Perdition, a new play written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach (right), which was due to open the following week at the Royal Court, then and now London’s premier venue for new and challenging work.
As I read, I felt a deepening horror. For the play – as I wrote at the start of the article that the paper published a few days later – claimed that: “Jews, and specifically Zionist Jews, collaborated with the Nazis. They did so, the play argues, because they regarded the massacre of their co-religionists as a political necessity, which would strengthen their hand at negotiations after the war to achieve the realisation of the state of Israel.”
According to the play, Zionist leaders in Hungary, the last country to witness mass deportations to Auschwitz, in the summer of 1944, connived with none other than Adolf Eichmann in the hope of maximising the number of victims. They were, Allen said, the “Zionist knife in the Nazi fist”.
If this had been true, they would have been entirely successful. In this last, terrible spasm of the industrial phase of the Holocaust, more than half a million were murdered.
Two days after my piece was published, the Royal Court cancelled Perdition’s run, on the eve of its first preview, leaving the theatre dark for six weeks. I found myself at the centre of a vicious, ugly row, accused of being a “tool of the Zionist lobby” and worse.
I soon learnt that to the anti-Zionist left, historical truth and accuracy counted for nothing. Allen had described his play as “the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written” because it undermined what he called “the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust”. He was, in other words, literally a Holocaust denier. Yet to swathes of the left, he was a hero – and I was a villain, who had silenced a brave voice whose only sin was to expose the fact that Israel really didn’t have the “right to exist”. For years, I’ve tried not to think too much about this experience. But the current row over the Royal Court’s latest production Rare Earth Mettle, in which no one at the theatre seems to have clocked that the character of a rapacious capitalist bore a stereotypically Jewish name, Hershel Fink, has brought it all back.
Allen and Loach repeatedly claimed that the events in Perdition were all based on fact. Loach even stated in 2004 that “minute details were rigorously pursued”.
Yet it took me just a few days’ research to establish that the script I was given contained numerous lies. The late Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who reviewed the script for the theatre, reached the same view, telling me: “It bore no relation to historical fact whatsoever.” For example, the play correctly showed that the Judenrat, the puppet Jewish body established by the Nazis, collaborated with them in the early stages of the occupation. But it falsely alleged that this was led by the Zionist Rudolf Kasztner, who was not even a member.
Far from conniving in genocide, when Eichmann arrived in Hungary, Zionist leaders began to make plans for resistance, including armed struggle and the smuggling of thousands of Jews out of Hungary. As a consequence, 25,000 managed to escape, and another 100,000 survived the deportations in Budapest itself, using forged identity documents.
Before I wrote the article, I interviewed Allen and Loach at their rehearsal room, referring repeatedly to the script that was open in front of us. Allen admitted that he had wrongly conflated the Judenrat and the Zionists, but claimed that he was “unaware” of the Zionist-led resistance. However, after the play was cancelled, Allen accused me of using an “early draft” that had been “leaked”, and went on to publish a sanitised version in which many of the play’s most egregious misrepresentations had been changed. In fact, the draft Roger that gave me had come from the Royal Court press office.
To me, the most shocking thing about this affair, which rumbled on in the letters pages of the Guardian for months, and in discussions about “free speech” on Radio 4, was the almost total lack of support I got from my colleagues. Until then, I had considered myself a person of the left, a member of the Guardian tribe. Now I encountered a chill, and from some, open hostility.
The article attracted no factual complaints. It accurately reflected what happened in Hungary in 1944, and at the Royal Court in the months preceding January 1987. Moreover, my own reporting beat at the paper was racism and race relations, and I was fiercely committed to the anti-racist cause. But as David Baddiel was to put it many years later, I was learning that in these areas, Jews don’t count.
Two very senior executives — men I had much admired, who are now dead — told me that in their view, it would have been better for the world if Israel had not come into being.
In their view, the play should have been performed, even if it was somewhat lax with the facts. The two propositions, it seemed, were connected: for the sake of damaging Jews’ claim to Israel, it was ok to lie.
And now we have Rare Earth Mettle. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
