On 1st March, the Royal Court Theatre made an extraordinary admission. In an internal report into its own mistakes, the theatre’s board recognised that “people working in theatre often feel uncomfortable in disclosing that they are Jewish.” They’re not wrong. As one young Jewish theatre-maker told me recently: “I sometimes feel Jewish people in theatre need our own #MeToo movement—not to compare our experience to the crimes addressed by that movement, but as a model for finally breaking silence.”
Why had the Royal Court broken its own silence, and pledged that Jewish people should indeed be comfortable at the theatre? In November, news emerged that Rare Earth Mettle, the theatre’s latest play by the writer Al Smith, would feature an avaricious billionaire with the name Hershel Fink—about as Jewish a name as you can get. It didn’t help that the plot’s denouement saw him bribing a professor to rewrite tribal history, so that a man working for him could stake an indigenous claim to mineral-rich land.
When first criticised, the Royal Court issued a statement recognising the antisemitic potential of the name, acknowledging an “unconscious bias” and denying that the character had been intended to be Jewish or that the play was about Judaism. Smith changed the name to “Henry Finn” and the play went ahead. In apologising for “unconscious bias,” the Royal Court was trying to explain how theatre-makers, who apparently didn’t think of “Hershel Fink” as an Ashkenazi Jewish name, could have nonetheless associated it subliminally with avarice, rootlessness and a drive towards economic domination.
On two occasions this winter, though, I informed the theatre that whistleblowers had provided me with evidence that the play’s director, Hamish Pirie, had been warned in advance that the name was Jewish—and that the name given to the character could thus be read as antisemitic. Both times, the theatre later publicly accepted that these warnings had been given, but stressed that Pirie had not passed them onto the playwright. The March report stated that “this issue did not result from any deliberate act of antisemitism,” conceding that Pirie was at the time “recovering from a serious illness.” Pirie, meanwhile, apologised to the Jewish community “for the considerable hurt caused by my failures.”
Context matters. Even in comparison with other theatres, the Royal Court is unusual in the small number of Jewish people who have worked there—perhaps because of its association with plays which could have offended those in the Jewish community. In 1987, Ken Loach, who is highly critical of Israel’s actions with regard to Palestinians, directed Jim Allen’s Perdition, which suggested that Hungarian Jewish leaders had collaborated in the Holocaust in order to amplify calls for Zionism. (The theatre cancelled the show before it was performed.) Opinion is more split over Caryl Churchill’s 2009 short play, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. Director Dominic Cooke and many of the team involved were themselves Jewish—but its theme of Jewish parents trying to justify the slaughter of Palestinian children to their offspring was accused by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, among others, of perpetuating the blood libel. (Churchill has strongly denied that her play is antisemitic.)
Since the Rare Earth Mettle scandal, the Royal Court’s artistic leadership has begun work with antisemitism experts, including the well-regarded group L’Taken. From the time I spent speaking to the Royal Court’s leadership, I have no doubt they were genuinely mortified about any blind spot on anti-Jewish racism.
On the day of the report’s release, I interviewed the Royal Court’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, for the Jewish Chronicle. She was emotional in her apologies, going much further than the legalistic language of the report. It was clear she wanted to walk a fine line between criticising her predecessors and acknowledging the arguments over the Royal Court’s history—although she was happy to promise she had no plans ever to commission Ken Loach.
I was struck by how honest Featherstone was about her theatre’s relationship with the left. She talked frankly about the extent to which a number of people in theatreland (and beyond) had taken too long to recognise how critics of Zionism could be accused of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party—“we all woke up too late.” Many Jewish theatre-makers raised this point with me when explaining their discomfort in the left-leaning theatre sector. In the report, the Royal Court said it “commits to make our theatre a safe place.” But it will take a while before it heals its relationship with the Jewish community.
