All About Jewish Theatre - Since Shylock :The representation of Jews and Jewish life in drama for three centuries.

Michael Kustow Writer. Producer. Broadcaster, has been for nearly four decades at the leading edge of innovation and excellence, as a writer and producer in the theatre, the avant-garde arts, films and television. His authorized biography of Peter Brook brings together his experiences in work in England, France and America, and is based on a friendship and collaboration with Brook of more than forty years. It was published in England by Bloomsbury Publishers, to coincide with Brook’s eightieth birthday in March 2005, in America by St. Martin’s Press, and in France by Editions du Seuil.
Born in 1939 in London from a family that originated in Kiev and Warsaw, Michael Kustow was educated at Haberdasher’s Aske’s School and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he took a B.A. in English. At Oxford, he acted and directed with his contemporaries, including Ariane Mnouchkine and Dudley Moore. He staged anti-war comedies on the CND marches from Aldermaston, and wrote about British and European theatre for the influential theatre magazine, Encore.
After university, he lived and worked on a kibbutz in the Galilee in Israel, and then began his artistic ‘love-affair’ with France. He joined Roger Planchon’s Theatre de La Cité during 1961/62 . In 1962 he wrote to Peter Hall, and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. From 1962 to 1967, It was at the RSC in the ‘sixties that he met Peter Brook, and worked with him on the Theatre of Cruelty season and as a writer for US. From 1968 to 1972 he was director of The Institute of Contemporary Arts,. In 1973, Peter Hall invited him to become an Associate Director of the National Theatre. Over the next seven years, he created the NT’s Platform Performances, directing work by Havel, Pinter, Ted Hughes, Brecht, and a complete cycle of Shakespeare's sonnets in a completely new order. In the National’s Cottesloe Theatre, he devised a cabaret of Brecht’s poems and Hanns Eisler’s songs. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he directed his new translation of Stravinsky and Ramuz’s The Soldier’s Tale, starring Claire Bloom Pinchas Zukerman, Wayne Sleep and Maina Gielgud. In 1980, he went to Boston at the invitation of Robert Burstein, for whose American Repertory Theatre he became Dramaturg, as well as Lecturer in Drama at Harvard There he taught a course on the director in the theatre, and ran a seminar on drama criticism. He returned to Britain in 1982 to become the first Commissioning Editor of Arts for the newly-launched Channel 4 Television, producing more than 500 hours of arts and music programmes over the next seven years After leaving Channel 4, he became an independent producer and writer. He has a particular interest in keeping the classical Greek legacy alive.
He contributed three programmes to Channel Four's 1993 Democracy season, marking the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of democracy in fifth-century BC Athens. The most ambitious of his Greek projects was the dramatic saga Tantalus, a ten-play cycle on the Trojan War and the Greek myths, written by John Barton and directed by Sir Peter Hall, of which he was Associate Producer. In 2001, he produced for BBC Knowledge Foreign Aids, a one-person satirical show about AIDS, written and performed by the South African performer, Pieter Dirk Uys. He is currently developing An Arm and a Leg, a music theatre piece about two actresses, one Israeli, one Palestinian, based on true stories from the conflict in the Middle East. web: http://www.bloomsbury.com/michaelkustow/

The eruption of Shakespeare’s Shylock onto the Elizabethan stage was so seismic it pre-empted the representation of Jews and Jewish life in drama for three centuries. In one gulp Shakespeare’s imagination consumed Jewish paranoia in a world of Christian persecution, Jewish faith in contracts in a slippery society and their patriarchal rule over children, especially daughters. It was as if, in one comedy splintered by his sulphurous Jew, Shakespeare had cast his giant shadow across the green, and there was no space left to play.

Circumventing the Shakespearean edifice, recent British theatre has explored Jews and Jewish destiny, raising questions that could not apply in Shakespeare’s day. He wrote in a diaspora time, a time of civil exclusion, a time before Zionism; today’s playwrights write in an age of assimilation and multiculturalism, of an actually existing Israel, which divides Jewish communities into fervent loyalists and frequently self-tortured critics.

Currently, a clutch of new plays and revivals show the range of modern drama about, though not always by, Jews. Ryan Craig’s What We Did To Weinstein at the Menier Chocolate Factory spearheads a London-wide Jewish arts festival ‘Dash05’, which aims to reaffirm Jewish culture. Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years, at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe, emerging from its sixteen-week rehearsal gestation, is a Chekhovian portrait of a family rent by belief and politics, the first time its author/director has explored his Jewish roots. And at the Hampstead Theatre, a revival of Gottfried Lessing’s 1779 play of ideas, Nathan The Wise, the first favourable portrayal of a Jew and advocacy of religious tolerance in German drama.

Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley, an epic family play, revived at the Tricycle, became the seminal work in the wave of Jewish playwriting of the late nineteen-fifties. Together with Roots and I’m Talking About Jerusalem, the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ came through from the Belgrade Theatre Coventry to the Royal Court in 1960, and imprinted a lasting image of ‘British-Jewish’ theatre. The realism of these plays’ East End Jewish milieu, their East-European pungency of speech, offhand humour, idealism, sense of struggle, lyrical structure and infectious family closeness, touched audiences. It was as if another’ way of seeing’ within Britishness were revealed. It went with the rebellious mood of the times.

What was less noticed in this first flush of success, as Wesker later observed, was that the plays depicted a series of defeats, not victories, and that the feted Jewish family, as well as nourishing, could as often as not be stifling. The socialism with which these plays were identified, in that heyday of the CND ‘sixties, was also depicted with caution. Wesker came out of a Communist household, with a weak father and a militant mother: the political legacy his younger characters inherit is marked by a tragic Jewish memory – the persecution of the Soviet Union’s Jews by Stalin and the anti-semitism he fostered.

In his later plays Wesker has sometimes seemed to take on the mantle of the suffering of the Jews. He contends that no British theatre wants to show ‘ a good Jew’, and the biggest victim is Shylock (1978), his response to Shakespeare’s play. Audaciously attempting to fill out but not excuse the demonic figure of Shylock, Wesker gives full rein to the character’s fury, echoing what most Jews feel about anti-Semitism, even when they know it has rational causes: ‘ Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew! I hear the name around and everywhere. Your wars go wrong, the Jews must be the cause of it; your economic systems crumble, there the Jew must be; your wives get sick of you – Jew will be an easy target for your frustration… There’s nothing we can do is right.’

If Wesker began as the Ben Shahn of British-Jewish theatre, Bernard Kops was and remains its Chagall. His Hamlet of Stepney Green opened at Oxford Playhouse in 1957 (like Wesker’s, an out-of-town premiere; the West End and metropolitan tastes were still immune to Jewishness). Kops’ dream-like, boldly-coloured play of the journey and initiation of a son brought to the stage another vernacular East End voice, not unlike the Jewish voices Jack Rosenthal was getting onto British television, less class-bound than its theatre. But it also a poetry that owed much to the Old Testament, and from the Jewish, and above all the Yiddish, tradition, it conveyed a joyful but wary Messianism. The world could be redeemed, but the price might be terrible.

Because of his impish and ‘folksy’ idiom Kops has not enjoyed the recognition of his contemporaries, though he has gone on writing scores of plays. One such unperformed play is Kops’ Returning We Hear The Larks, about a Jewish librarian, the ghost of Isaac Rosenberg and a Bangladeshi girl fleeing an arranged marriage. A site-specific rehearsed reading took place recently in Whitechapel Library, where Kops (and earlier, Rosenberg) grew up and where the play is set, now due for demolition. It brought a Jewish gaze to bear on current Asian struggles between family and children’s independence.

Harold Pinter, the third of this generation, probably wouldn’t relish being labelled a ‘Jewish playwright’ any more than any other label that’s been attached to him. But the patterns of Jewishness are there, infused and embedded: a sudden awareness of English as an odd, sometimes alien language, the naked shock of violence and totalitarianism, an imminent sense of danger. I remember going with playwright Robert Bolt to the pre-London preview of Pinter’s The Homecoming at the Theatre Royal, Brighton. As we walked along the promenade afterwards, Bolt said, ‘This is what Pinter’s like: you’re walking along quite happily and suddenly you find yourself halfway down a manhole’. I also found the family in that play, although not tricked out with ‘ethnic’ qualities, very Jewish: in its maleness, its patriarchy, its blood-thickness, the ferocity of its rage. A tougher, more social harshness, scrutinising the fate of the Jews from outside, marked two striking plays of the 1970s: Good, by C. P. Taylor, about the transformation of a mild-mannered German schoolteacher into an SS officer, and Singer by Peter Flannery ( a non-Jew), about a Holocaust survivor who becomes a Rachman-like crooked landlord.

The younger playwrights of today present a different landscape. Some, like writer/director Julia Pascal in a series of plays for her touring company, have explored Jewish tragedy in a wider European context, or questioned sentimental views of the Yiddish theatrical culture, as in her Yiddish Queen Lear (2001). Others, like Patrick Marber, the extremely successful author of Closer, suddenly dropped the hard-edged surfaces of his comedies in Howard Katz (2001)for catastrophic fall of his eponymous failed showbiz agent, a Job-like man who suffers from what Salman Rushdie once described as ‘a god-shaped hole in me’. Very Jewish, that terror of the sudden plunge from the heights of success. Arthur Schnitzler, another non-accepting Jew whose acerbic plays Marber’s resemble, might have written it.

The watershed in playwrights’ representation of the Jews has been the 1967 Six Day War and its aftermath. Jews around the world have had to adjust to unfamiliar roles in their attachment to Israel: the pride, verging on hubris, of the conqueror and the brutality of the occupier. Because of this conflict, Jewishness has been thrust out of its own orbit, and collided with other identities, other demands.

The protagonist of Ryan Craig’s new play What We Did to Weinstein is Josh, a British Jew who has volunteered for the Israeli army and is arrested for mistreating a Palestinian captive. With cinematic flashbacks and the tightness of good screenwriting, Craig centres his play on the ultimately failed love of two young people – Josh, and Sara, a journalist dedicated to exposing the villainies of Israel’s occupation. Two old men complete the Schnitzlerian circle. Max, Josh’s father, is staunchly anti-Zionist; for Sam, Sara’s father, Israel can do no wrong.

Their stories are amplified through Sam’s nurse, a Muslim whose brother becomes an extreme Islamist, and through Yusef, Josh’s prisoner, who may or may not be a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs – army intelligence is rushed and may be flawed. Many such intersections criss-cross the family comedy of Hendon and Colindale and the romantic intrigue, finally facing the two British-Jewish lovers with a harsh self-examination. Josh asks Sara, ‘You used to believe Sara. You used to believe in Israel. We started from the same place. How did we come so far apart?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘But I think…I think that day Rabin was killed. Shot by a settler. A Jew. I suddenly thought… We’re just like everyone else. Not special. Not chosen. We don’t think with one mind. We’re fractured, we’re confused and if we go on like we are, we’re finished.’

This is the perplexed conclusion to a journey which began with Shylock’s righteous rage, the wisdom of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, and the indignation of Wesker’s Shylock. As the time-worn Jewish joke has it: ‘Lord, you made us the Chosen People. Couldn’t you have chosen somebody else?’

Source: The Times