What promises to be an intriguing insight into antisemitism in contemporary Britain lacks heart.
Written by Jonathan Freedland and co-directed by Vicky Featherstone and Audrey Sheffield, Jews. In Their Own Words runs at the Royal Court Theatre until the 22nd October. The play was sparked by an idea from Tracy-Ann Oberman, and follows last year’s production of Rare Earth Mettle staged at the Royal Court featuring a grasping, villainous Hershel Fink, an overtly Jewish-coded character which prompted accusations of antisemitism.
Humorously, the character of Fink himself opens Freedland’s production in a creation-style segment, with lighting was designed by Rory Beaton providing a celestial start to the show – let there be (spot)light, as it were. Crashing thunder and rolling cut-out clouds suspended from the ceiling designate the meta-theatricality of the scene (with thanks to stage designed by Georgia de Grey), and a booming woman’s voice emanating from above explains what the bemused Fink is doing there.
She informs him of his part in a new play exploring the history of antisemitism in Britain, the words taken verbatim from interviews with twelve Jews. ‘But how will we know if they’re the right jews?’ despairs Fink, highlighting Freedland’s self-awareness of the myriad problems of depicting the voices of a representative selection of British Jewry. Despite such awareness, Jews. suffers from the very problems it acknowledges; the production tries to cover too much ground, and in the process spreads itself too thin. There is a notably superficial exploration of the experiences of mixed race Jews – journalist Stephen Bush (Billy Ashcroft), who is Black and Jewish, attests that both groups ‘see you neither as fully Black or fully Jewish, but rather as an exciting third thing’ – however this line of inquiry essentially stops here.
Jews. cannot decide on the tone it wishes to strike. Breezy humour is mixed with devastating testimony, medieval tableaux elucidating the origins of antisemitism, round-table discussion forums, projected news stories and tweets and their accompanying sound effects which flood the back curtain and several portable screens, and a bizarre vaudeville sequence played for laughs, the cast members performing the can-can and singing ‘it was the Jews!’. While the tableaux and dance number clearly underscore the farcical nature of antisemitic conspiracy theories – a puppet of a Christian boy is sacrificed for blood rite purposes during the former, while one particularly audacious projected headline screams ‘DC Lawmaker Blames Weather on the Rothschilds [sic]’ – these disparate elements, jumping from one dramatic style, time period, or set of production choices to another, never succeed in forming a whole. Some alchemy to weld the pieces together is missing.
The play does offer some pertinent inquiry into the types of prejudice faced by modern British Jews, harking back to twelfth century usury laws, reading into portrayals of Judas in art history (hunched at one end of the last supper’s table, clutching his money pouch), dramatising the horrific abuse received by Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge throughout their time within the Labour party, and unpicking famous depictions of Jews in media, with Shakespeare, Dickens and Bram Stoker cementing certain offensive stereotypes in the collective imagination in the forms of Shylock, Fagin and even Dracula (a shadowy figure from the east who drinks blood and is scared of crosses). In this respect, Jews. successfully calls for a greater awareness of antisemitism in contemporary British society, and particularly of one’s own unconscious bias, refusing to allow for the assumption that because ‘you’re on the left and a good person and go to the right protests’, that you haven’t absorbed some of the anti-Jewish sentiment, the ancient cultural fantasies still so pervasive in current times.
Sadly, in bouncing off too many talking points, Jews. rang hollow; in a play formed of 180,000 words taken verbatim from real British Jews, it somehow lacked heart, in what could have been an opportunity for some truly exciting new Jewish perspectives in theatre.