The enthusiasm here for staging 'Seven Jewish Children' sharply contrasts with criticism of Caryl Churchill's play overseas, writes PETER CRAWLEY
MOVING THROUGH Dublin last weekend, a person could be forgiven for thinking that Caryl Churchill’s new play was suddenly everywhere. Excerpts spilled out from the morning radio shows. A group of five performers declaimed it from sheaves of tattered paper on the corner of Merrion Row above the burble of traffic. Among the book stalls of Temple Bar Square another small troupe performed it with still more discretion, slipping between unsuspecting browsers unsure whether they had overheard lines from a scripted drama or a quiet, private conversation.
Although the play would later come indoors, with Rough Magic staging the 10-minute piece in Project Arts Centre, Shining Eyes Theatre Company taking it to the Piedescalso Art Cafe, and Mirari’s repeat performances in Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, there was a sense that Churchill’s rapid response to the bombing of Gaza had already seeped far beyond the confines of the theatre. The subject of deeply divided opinion across international media commentators and the blogosphere, the play seemed to have taken the next logical step and simply become airborne.
These were the first of several performances of Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gazain Ireland, most of which came in response to an open call for productions from the theatre initiative Project Brand New. The performance rights for Churchill's play are free to companies so long as there is no admission and there is a collection for the Medical Aid for Palestinians charity.
The enthusiasm here for staging the play is sharply contrasted with the heated and often censorious criticism with which Seven Jewish Childrenhas been met overseas. In seven scenes, the play depicts adults debating what they should tell a child during various stages of Jewish history, moving implicitly from the Holocaust and its aftermath to the founding of the state of Israel, and touching upon various conflicts in the Middle East up to the most recent conflagration in Gaza.
In the heat of the conflict the play reads as a polemic, charting a Jewish trajectory from victims to aggressors, while putting both vicious and contradictory sentiments into the mouths of its characters. “Tell her there are still people who hate Jews/ Tell her there are people who love Jews.” Given the polarised and emotional debate over Gaza, recently described as “the most intractable, faith-dazed and history-inflamed spot on Earth”, Churchill’s play, written in a week and premiered less than a month later at the Royal Court Theatre in London, was understandably controversial.
Likening the drama to medieval mystery plays, the Spectator'sMelanie Phillips called it "an open vilification of the Jewish people", a "despicable act". Howard Jacobson of the London Independentwas equally strident: "You cannot tell the whole story of anywhere in 10 minutes," he wrote, "but then why would you want to unless you conceive it to be simple and one-sided?" Seeing the piece as "wantonly inflammatory", Jacobson was not the only objector to raise the issue of "blood libel", where Jews are depicted as revelling in the sacrifice of innocents.
Moved to write to the paper to refute the accusation, Churchill distinguished between criticism of Israel’s actions and anti-Semitism, stressing that her play showed the difficulty of explaining violence to children. Alluding to the most controversial lines of the play’s finale, Churchill wrote: “Finally, one of the parents explodes, saying, ‘No, stop preventing her from knowing what’s on the TV news’. His outburst is meant, in a small way, to shock during a shocking situation.”
Little of the debate surrounding Seven Jewish Children has referred to the play in performance, the arguments largely confined to the text. But Churchill’s play is by no means straightforward. It prescribes no explicit context, nor characters. The lines can be divided among performers however the production so chooses, and neither the words of hatred nor mollification seem to carry greater authority. Everything seems open to interpretation.
EVEN THE FINAL scene, which may read like a splenetic, bilious outpouring, can be either defused or aggravated by the establishment of circumstance and character: “Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing till we’re safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policeman, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re the chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.”
In a performance outside St Stephen’s Green, directed by Duncan Molloy, Megan Riordan delivered these lines with unrestrained aggression, isolating herself not only from the audience, but also from her co-performers, whose quietly stunned and repulsed responses indicated a wider breadth of Jewish opinion.
In Mirari’s production, Sara-Jayne Quigley delivered the same speech on the point of hysteria, a distraught parent barely in control of her words. The cast of Hillary Cotter’s production shared the last line in unison, like a weary sigh. While in Rough Magic’s version, Lise-Ann McLaughlin uttered the words with a cold, unwavering precision, leaving her partner, Nick Dunning, to supply the appalled counter-balance: “Don’t tell her that.”
Every production was distinct, yet all sought more reflection than provocation, seeming to acknowledge the intensity of the play’s reception while attempting to cleave to human truths at times of crisis and extreme emotion. Anyone expecting any public opposition to the performances was to be disappointed: the only visible resistance came when three members of the OPW were unconvinced that Molloy’s production had permission to perform in St Stephen’s Green.
“I would have been entirely opposed to doing something that was, in a sense, anti-Israel,” Lynne Parker said before rehearsing the play. “It’s more to do with feeling the process of brutalisation that goes on in a war situation and which can become a legacy. You don’t have to be told that. It’s still happening 100 miles up the road.”
At the centre of Parker’s interpretation was the dilemma facing parents who must decide what their emotional and ideological inheritance will entail. Casting seven couples – all of them professional actors and real-life partners – Parker focused on personal relationships and moral guardianship, slowing the pace to lessen the sense of polemic. “What is it that drives people to those extremes? That’s what drama is about.”
If Parker’s approach seemed grounded and sensitive, others had shied away completely. Project Brand New’s co-ordinator Jody O’Neill admitted that, following the controversy that surrounded the Royal Court production, a number of originally interested groups decided not to follow through.
“People were reluctant to look at it or stage it, or felt it wasn’t what they thought it would be.” When O’Neill described Project Brand New’s quick decision to organise so many performances, she might have been speaking as much about the potentials and pitfalls of rapid-reaction theatre: “It all happened so fast.”
Notionally, this is the chief advantage of live performance, which can respond faster to political events than other art forms. “But most of the time it doesn’t,” says O’Neill, “because of the nature of funding and how long it takes to get an idea from germination to finished product. That was part of the attraction here. It is quite rare that theatre really does directly address something head on while it’s happening.”
SUCH SWIFTNESS OF engagement can cause problems, however. Jon Ihle, a journalist for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Dublin, considers the play an outrage; one that continues centuries-old distortions of concepts in Judaism, either through expedience or malice. “I think [the play] has nothing to do with the specifics of Israeli policy,” he argues. “What I think it is, instead, is a bizarre attempt to psychoanalyse the Jewish mind – not the Israeli one – from the position of an outsider who, from the evidence of the play, knows very little about Jewish doctrine, Zionism and what Jews actually think of Israel and its founding.”
Ihle points to the concept of a “chosen people” as meaning an imposition of an obligation, but which here comes off in the play with a sense of bloody-minded entitlement; that the play’s brisk chronology suggests Israel was founded as a compensation for the Holocaust; and that the Palestinians are now victims of “a cosmic retribution” by the Jews. Much of this, he says, is happening “at a dog-whistle level”.
“It sets up a retrospective exculpation of European responsibility for the Holocaust,” Ihle says, echoing a point made by Howard Jacobson. “I think what Churchill is doing in the play is saying, ‘Look at what the Jews are doing here. They’re doing this horrible thing, surely we shouldn’t feel bad about what was done to them before.’ Or even worse – they deserved what happened before.”
The charge of anti-Semitism tends to immediately foreclose debate, and Ihle agrees that it can be abused. “I think Churchill’s work is as close as I’ve seen [to anti-Semitism],” he says. “I really think so.”
O’Neill understands the allegation, but doesn’t agree with it. “Even though the writing is perhaps rapid-response and fiery, there is a whole life of experience behind that play,” she says. “Even though it’s not a perfect piece, I think the fact it can stimulate so much debate is a really lively thing. I understand that people are angry and I can see why the play might make them angry, but that’s a really important thing for theatre to do. Too often theatre makes us sit back and fail to react to something.”
When I meet Wayne Jordan, who is directing the Abbey’s production this week, the director has been monitoring every side of the discussion and admitted to conflicted feelings. “If you think the theatre is responsive, you should look at the Wikipedia page,” he tells me. “I understand that it’s incendiary and angry and a little dangerous, as all argument is,” he says, “and especially argument that is now current and has high stakes. But I don’t think the play is closed off.”
Instead, Jordan saw a connection with Churchill's recent works Drunk Enough To Say I Love You, which portrayed Britain and America's "special relationship" as a sado-masochistic gay love affair, and Far Away, where the whole world and nature itself fall into open combat; plays "where the political and the personal become compounded into the instant".
“It’s an imaginative exercise, which all theatre is,” Jordan says. “It’s a firmly held belief that we can imagine how people are and in some way it’s essential to our nature. Although Caryl Churchill’s play is full of anger, and a voice that’s angry, it’s also full of empathy, because it’s imagining people in various extreme situations.”
Nobody I spoke to felt the play offered solutions to the continuing crisis in Gaza, few felt that any play could adequately parse either the history of a nation or a people, but everyone was on some level affected by the play. There is no definitive production, Lynne Parker said, only varying interpretations. One thing is for certain though; you will have every opportunity to see at least one.
Seven Jewish Children
runs Mar 12-14 at the Peacock after Ages of the Moon. Red Sandstone Varied Productions’ perform in six Kinsale venues March 11. UCD Dramsoc perform March 30. Bairbre Ní Chaoimh directs in the New Theatre, Dublin Mar 13. More to be confirmed. Download Caryl Churchill’s play: www.royalcourttheatre.com
