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Judi Herman is a freelance writer, broadcaster and producer, working mainly for BBC Radio World Service and the BBC’s main UK speech network, [Radio 4]. She specialises in making radio features on arts and entertainment, religion, education, travel and human-interest stories. Among programmes to which she contributes regularly are the World Service Arts and Entertainment Magazine The Ticket, the World Service Heart and Soul Series and Radio Four’s flagship magazine programme Woman’s Hour. She also writes regular theatre reviews for the influential UK theatre website Whatsonstage.com and is a guest performing arts lecturer at Middlesex University Judi has written several stage shows, including How the West End Was Won, a show celebrating Jewish life in the West End of London, commissioned to accompany the London Jewish Museum's exhibition Living Up West; and Stones of Kolin, a play with music, charting six hundred years of Jewish life in a small Czech town, performed in both London and Kolin in the Czech Republic. She’s also worked in Public Relations, including theatre PR, so she reckons she knows the theatre business from more sides than most! Judi lives near London with Steve, her husband of twenty-eight years. They have a son and a daughter in their early twenties – and a Bedlington Terrier just coming up to Bar Mitzvah age! E-mail : judi_herman@hotmail.com  

The German playwright Gotthold Lessing, who wrote ‘Nathan the Wise’ in 1779, is one of the leading literary figures of the Enlightenment, a movement that rejected religious intolerance in favour of rationality and humanity. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor, who turned from theology to theatre, much to his father’s disgust.

The Hampstead Theatre’s revival in a twenty-first century translation by Edward Kemp is nothing if not timely. The action is set in the Jerusalem of the Crusaders, which is depicted as a multicultural city with Christians, Jews and Muslims living in comparative harmony that might have something to teach us today.

Nathan is a wise old Jew, who has a beautiful daughter, Rachel. A fiery young Crusader knight falls for her and when it comes to light that she’s adopted, a Christian child brought up as a Jewess, it seems that Nathan is at risk at the hands of outraged Christians. The peacemakers turn out to be Saladin, the Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, and his sister Sittah.

But first Saladin crosses intellectual swords with Nathan, with a dangerous challenge to prove which of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is the true faith. Nathan proves his wisdom by telling Saladin a parable comparing God and the three main monotheistic religions to a king with three equally beloved sons – and in a real wish fulfilment ending, these three religions are united in the young couple.

It would be a shame to give away an ending as preposterous as anything in Shakespeare’s late Romances, but suffice it to say the young couple find friendship, rather than sexual love, for Lessing valued friendship above all human relationships.

One of his own closest friends was Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn, the composer. Above all he admired his friend and chess partner’s intellect. But he would have been all too aware, that although Europe’s best minds flocked to talk philosophy with the ‘German Socrates’, he remained part of a Jewish underclass who could only enter Berlin through a gate reserved for Jews – and cattle.

Mendelssohn is said to have been the pattern for Nathan and in Michael Pennington’s genial performance, you can imagine the quiet charisma of the man. And you can’t help engaging with the combination of warmth and shrewdness, steely resolve and beneficence displayed by Saladin and Sittah (Vincent Ebrahim and Shelley King).

So Lessing does rather tip the balance in favour of his non-Christian protagonists. From Justin Avoth’s sinister Patriarch of Jerusalem to Daya, Rachel’s nurse (a splendidly splenetic Anna Carteret!), they have an unattractive - and dangerous - belief in their own superiority. As a result, they indulge in the sort of scheming that proves deadly in tragedy, but is happily foiled in romantic plots! Even Sam Troughton’s ardent Templar knight has to overcome his prejudices for love of the modest and intelligent girl he believes at first to be a Jewess (Celia Meiras).

I took my friend Imam Shahid Hussain, Interfaith Adviser at Regent’s Park Mosque, London, to see the play, (our second theatre visit together). He was impressed with the wisdom and tolerance evident in Lessing’s take on twelfth century Jerusalem. And although he was of course pleased to find the Muslims cast as peacemakers, he saw the messages for our troubled times, just as Lessing’s audiences would have understood the parable he was telling them.

Anthony Clark’s production is lucid – and luminous thanks to James Farncombe’s lovely evocation of Jerusalem’s golden light on Patrick Connellan’s walled set. But this is not so much a wake up call to end intolerance as a muted ‘if only’, that does rather fizzle out in the complicated and far-fetched ending. Nevertheless Lessing’s enlightened message is still worth hearing today.

Nathan the Wise continues at the Hampstead Theatre until 15 October. The box office number is 0044 20 7722 9301

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