The cost of living in Amsterdam

A woman opens a gas bill in 2019 — and finds it dates from 1944. The sum is huge. What does it signify? The answer goes to the core of her identity, as a Jew and an Israeli, and is the subject of prize-winning Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur’s play Amsterdam which has its UK premiere next week.

The play was conceived when Arad Yasur was living in Amsterdam and is set there. “I think that being a foreigner is an experience that every person should have,” she says. “Being an immigrant, having to struggle with everyday life in a foreign language, different mentality, sometimes being looked upon with arrogance, understanding that all the other minorities in the hosting country share your struggle — it puts things into perspective.

“You want to shout: treat me like a human being, not like an Israeli or Jewish (or Italian or American or Chinese or Jordanian or whatever), but you have to ask yourself: Do you see humans or identities? How do you treat ‘the other’ back home?

“I think if every young Israeli went to Europe for three years instead of going to the Army for three years, then the political situation would be better.”

The gas bill was inspired by Charlotte van den Berg, a Dutch student, who, in 2012, was researching at the Amsterdam City Hall archive and came across letters from Jews, back from the death camps, being asked to pay the bills and city taxes for the months they had been away.

“Beyond the inhuman way that the city council was treating its returning Jewish citizens, I was obsessed with the question: who lived in their houses while they were gone, using electricity and gas? It’s the question which ignited the plot.”

The play won a prize when staged in Berlin. “ It is getting a growing interest in more and more countries which is lovely to see.”

In London, she hopes that audiences won’t see it as just another Holocaust play — “The story here has many twists and turns and aspires to open up the discourse about the Holocaust by using different strategies such as dramatic tension, humour and , detective-like investigation.

“I want to tell the audience: the Holocaust is not over, it will always be whispering in our ears, even if new generations will forget it. We must still speak about it. To quote the play ‘Jews are not passé!’.

She stresses that the play’s discussion of the Holocaust is not there just to keep the memory, but has a contemporary purpose, to show that the contemporary European conversation about foreigners, refugees, Muslims, blacks, and also Jews, proves minorities in Europe “are still the ones paying the price for European politics”.

That the character is Israeli makes it more complicated, she adds, because growing up in Israel as a Jew means growing up as part of a majority, combined with “persecution paranoia” from the past, embedded in the Israeli education system and national sentiment.

“As a child and teenager and later as a soldier in Israel, you are being brainwashed continuously that ‘the world hates us.’ Then you try to live in Europe and you cannot tell the difference any more between political criticism over Israel, antisemitism, inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, philosemitism, general xenophobia and identity indifference — they are all messed up in your mind.

“The character in the play actually hardly experiences antisemitic events, most of what is being told or done to her is a speculation in her mind or in the minds of those telling her story.”

She says she knows that anti-semitism is an issue nowadays in the UK, and the play deals with that, but hopes that the UK audience “will find more than antisemitism in the play and will be able to find the bigger themes that are treated in the play, more universal, which are relevant for the time and place we live in, no matter which role we are playing in it”.

The way the play is presented is as important as the story itself. Arad Yasur explains: “I was looking for my own way of writing plays since my early 20s. I started my academic studies in theatre but I couldn’t yet explain to myself why I am so keen on theatre over other forms of story-telling. Very few theatre performances I saw in Israel really supported this passion.

“Looking back, I remember that for me, always, the most powerful moment in the theatre was the applause. Whether a performance was good or not, the moment the actors went ‘out of character’ always brought me to tears. The transformation and the fact that we shared something with these real people on stage did something to me, but I couldn’t, back then, translate it to aesthetics. For that to happen I guess I had to move to Amsterdam and see a completely different way of making theatre. “

Dutch theatre, she says is far more “performance-oriented” than anything she had seen before, with the audience much more aware of the performers as performers, and not just as the characters they portray. In Amsterdam, “Some performers are developing the protagonist’s story on stage. It starts with a huge gas bill which ‘she’, the nameless protagonist, finds on the door step of her Amsterdam apartment and it leads to the formulation of who ‘she’ is. She goes to the supermarket, she goes to a gynaecologist, she visits her agent, she goes to the bar, and this gas bill is in her bag the whole time. But why did she get such a big gas bill? She doesn’t know. Then the performers come up with the story of the bill which goes back to 1944 and makes a full circle back to the present.”

Arad Yasur moved back to Israel six years ago. “Objectively it was a senseless move because not much awaited me back in Israel. I am a person who doubts everything, who finds ambivalence in every situation, but somehow it was clear to me, back then, that I needed to go back.

“I started thinking of becoming a mother and sharing my childhood landscapes with my kids seemed important to me.

“The political landscape in the Netherlands and in Europe in general began to destabilise me, I felt that Islamophobia is my problem as much as it is the problem affecting Muslims in the Netherlands. I didn’t like the political discourse and I started finding myself in demonstrations, until at a certain point I stopped to ask, if it is going wrong everywhere and I have to act, I’d better go back to fight my own wars.”

Her new play BOMB – Variations on Refusal will have its world premiere next February in the Schauspiel theatre in Cologne, directed by British director Lily Sykes.

“This is the second time that the world premiere of a play of mine is not in Israel. I feel that although I am writing in Hebrew, and although I am dealing almost exclusively so far with political issues, there is something in my plays that speaks to people in 
other places, too, and has common ground and dialogue with audiences and people around 
the world.”

‘Amsterdam’ is at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond from September 6 to October 12