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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/  

When Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian who is the most scathing opponent of the Israeli Occupation, was in London last month, I asked him why he focussed his campaign more or less exclusively on the academic boycott. What about writers and artists? Frontier-crossing groups of Israeli and Palestinian bereaved parents,? The ‘East/West ‘ orchestra founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, bringing together young Arab and Israeli musicians? And what about Joshua Sobol, Israel’s most prolific and acute playwright, justly compared with the late Arthur Miller for his anatomy of his country’s moral disarray and his own hard-won moral probity?

Pappé, who speaks with passion and precision about the crimes of the Occupation, replied that there are many Israeli/Palestinian peace venture, ‘but few of them have any political edge.’ he knew Sobol and his plays well (there are nearly thirty of them, over four decades), and he respected them. But he didn’t think that a play by Sobol or a concert by Barenboim could prevent the death of a single child in the Territories, and ending the Occupation as swiftly, and if need be as harshly as possible, was the priority. For the time being, culture may have little to contribute, except, as in the South African boycott, by British playwrights and film-makers withholding their work.

He’s not wrong in that view, but it’s not the whole view. A play or a concerto or a good film doesn’t have an instant effect on people’s behaviour. Art is cumulative, it works on a longer time-scale than boycotts or physical resistance. Indeed, it’s a misnomer to speak about the ‘artistic resistance’ in Israel, as the guest editor of this section did, when he asked me to write this piece. The word ‘resistance’ in this sentence is a loose metaphor. It often winds up producing work whose only message is ‘Look how commited we are.’ There is a good deal of ‘political theatre’ in Israel, just as there is here. But to make a longer and stronger impression than the latest documentary exposé of the misdeeds of soldiers and settlers or the enraged despair of suicide bombers, political theatre has to first work as theatre. Otherwise it’s just dramatised journalism.

Joshua Sobol’s long career as a playwright, and his engagement especially with the Palestinian/Israeli population, living inside Israel’s borders and, nominally at least, equal citizens with Jewish Israelis, is an affirmation of his freedom as a theatre-maker, his allegiance as a Jew and his rights and duties as a Israeli citizen.
He first came to attention in Britain with the 1989 production of his play Ghetto at the National Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner. The story of a theatre troupe inside the Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania, playing melodramas and comedies in defiance of the Nazi deportations and death-camps, it was a pivotal play for Sobol. Born in 1939, he grew up in a cosmopolitan Israeli village, Tel Mond, speaking both Hebrew and Yiddish, and scraps of half-a-dozen other immigrant languages. ‘My grandmother,’ he says, ‘was a member of the Bund (a Jewish secular socialist party of Lithuania, Poland and Russia), who refused to learn Hebrew until her last day.’

To continue to speak Yiddish in Israel in the 19402 and 50s was to go against the grain; Hebrew was reinvented and spoken as an assertion of nationalist identity. But the interplay of the two languages and the r experiences they enshrined, suited Sobol: Yiddish, with its rich coinages and hybrid interactions, kept alive the complexity of Jewish Diaspora existence, while Hebrew embodied the commitment to building a nation after centuries of exile.
It was in Yiddish that Sobol found the inspiration for Ghetto. He had heard about a ghetto theatre that had played throughout the war, and as a playwright, was curious. A survivor from the ghetto (which was liquidated in September 1943, despite resistance from Jewish partisans) told Sobol about a diary written by a ghetto inmate called Kruk. ‘

‘I've rarely read a document written with such an incisive look at reality,’ says Sobol. ‘The Diary just notes down everything, even the opening of a brothel in the ghetto, and the orgies that took place involving Judenrat (Jewish Council) leaders, along with German officers.
‘Reading his book revolutionized my vision of the Holocaust, for the diary suggests a vision of a society very busy with living, and not preparing to die. Kruk's Diary depicts the vitality, energy and will to live that motivated and inspired those 15-16,000 Jews who lived in the Ghetto.’
Sobol’s play at the National Theatre was heart-breaking, counter-pointing plaintive Yiddish songs about love and the changing seasons, comic patter and the militancy of the Vilna Partisans’ marching song. It set out in precise detail the tricks and betrayals by which people tried to survive the relentless killing machine. And in Commandant Gens and his number two Kittel it portrayed two Nazis who, against their better judgement, came under the spell of these spirited, talented Jewish performers.

Some in the ghetto said it was not right to make theatre in what was, sooner or later, a slaughterhouse: ‘No theatre in the graveyard’. But because it looks these contradictions full in the face, because it makes you jump from chorus-girls and comedians to deportations and death-camps, Ghetto is a more devastating account of the European Jewish Holocaust than most simplified narratives, memorializing the killing, mourning the victims, but not evoking the lives and vitality that were killed.

By the time Ghetto opened in London, Sobol had already made a big impact on his Israeli audiences, by critically evoking in his early plays milestone events in Zionist history – the exuberant, Tolstoyan culture-culture of the pioneering kibbutzniks in The Night of the Twentieth (1976), and in The Soul of a Jew (1982), so-called ‘Jewish self-hatred’, through the fin-de-siècle story of Otto Weininger, convert to Protestantism, sexual inadequate, suicide. Through this extravagant character in Theodore Herzl’s Vienna, Sobol lifted the lid on eddies and eruptions in the grand narrative of early Zionism. In The Palestinian Girl (1985), he exposed the Israeli denial of the reality of Palestinians. But it was with The Jerusalem Syndrome (1987)that he fully used theatre as a counter-force to national myths.

Sobol wrote the play for the Haifa Municipal Theatre, where he had been Artistic Director since 1984. Within this theatre, Sobol and his colleagues made a courageous bid to combat the exclusions of Israeli culture, by forming a racially integrated company of Israeli-Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli actors. Over the eight years of this experiment, there was an interplay between the skills and experience of actors from both backgrounds. The repertoire was enlarged. But it took the mythical storytelling and the mixed-race casting of The Jerusalem Syndrome to bring the cocktail to combustion.
The play is a wild, Bunuel-esque fantasia on themes of the most mythologized episodes of Jewish history. The source for Sobol’s play was The Jewish War, a history of the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire in 66-74 AD, as experienced by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. From the eventful struggle of the Jewish Zealots which Josephus describes, modern Israel had forged many myths, above all the martyrdom of the defenders of Masada, choosing to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Romans. Sobol demystified these inflated and distorted histories.
Particularly irksome to the Israeli Right and to the Zealots of today was his depiction of a Jewish sergeant who fires on peasants and a pregnant woman. Sobol sharpened his revisionist history by intermingling costumes and situations of the present day with historical figures – just as Howard Brenton did by interplaying Roman centurions and their Anglo- Saxon victims with present-day British soldiers in Northern Ireland in his The Romans in Britain at our National Theatre in 1980.

To make matters even better (or worse), Haifa Municipal Theatre performed the play as part of an official festival celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the state of Israel. On the first night there was a pitched battle in front of the theatre, fiercer than anything depicted on the stage. Demonstrators from the Right (including a man carrying a poster with the slogan SS=SOBOL SYNDROME) confronted left-wing counter-demonstrators. Inside, Rightists had bought tickets for the gallery, from which they threw flashes and stink-bombs. It was an hour before the play could begin. Sobol was widely vilified, and resigned as Haifa’s Artistic Director.

These snapshots from the career of Joshua Sobol can be seen as valuable evidence of how a theatre-artist can invert and contest the prevalent consensus. ‘Theatre is the “opposite”,’ Sobol said to an interviewer during the Haifa fracas, ‘it dies if it conforms.’ Over the past twenty years, Sobol has produced a variety of plays, inside Israel and in Vienna which has become a second axis of his work. Increasingly, they have taken on the ‘refusenik’ movement in the Israel army and air force. In Eye Witness (2002), which attracted demonstrative audiences, he told the story of an Austrian Catholic peasant Franz Jaegerstatter, who in 1943 refused to be recruited into the Nazi army, took a position against the Nazi establishment and paid for it with his life. At the same time Sobol signed a petition supporting pilots who refuse to fly combat missions in the Territories. His play was oblique, but unmistakably a metaphor of today. A more direct, factual story, might have been turned down by Israeli theatres.

Other recent plays have used absurd comedy to attack the self-assurance of a domineering Israeli family and the pain of soldiers taking the decision to desert the army. At the same time, Sobol and a group of other writers and academics have been holding regular meetings with Palestinian-Israeli villages in the Galilee, seeking to build bridges with their communities. Since sooner or later people inhabiting the same territory will have to live together, one might as well start rehearsing how to do now.

Ilan Pappé, though sceptical of the immediate effect of artistic events and interventions, was nonetheless ready to admit that artists like Sobol or Barenboim are prefiguring the society of tomorrow, when the bombs fall silent. The human as well as the combative sides of Sobol’s art will play their part in the polyphony of peace.

(2071)

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