So vast and varied is London theatre that sometimes it throws up unplanned seasons on its own, with no controlling hand. Plays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict abound. Well, there are a few.
The night after Gloria Tessler’s new play, Unveiling Hagar, opens at the New End in Hampstead, the Young Vic in Southwark will premiere I Am Yusuf and This is My Brother. Written by Palestinian Amir Nizar Zuabi, the play is seen from the perspective of two Palestinian young brothers in 1948, just as the British Mandate ends and Israel’s first war begins. Meanwhile Plan D by the Palestinian-Irish writer Hannah Khalil, which opens later this month at the Tristan Bates theatre, is based on testimonies from the 1948 war. Out of these three, Tessler’s play is perhaps the one most concerned with reconciliation.
A journalist who has worked for many papers, including the JC as reporter and feature writer, Tessler’s first play was The Windmill, about the life of Peter Kien, the Czech-Jewish poet and puppeteer who died in Auschwitz at 25. In her new work, Tessler has turned her gaze in part to the legacy of the Holocaust. Her two main characters are Max, a recently widowed London Jew, and Layla, a Palestinian woman with whom Max falls in love — a relationship that challenges the opinions and some of the prejudices of his family and friends.
The couple are each bound up in the history of their people. Layla once worked for the PLO in Ramallah, Max’s father was an Allied soldier at the liberation of Auschwitz. “Initially it wasn’t so much about the Middle East,” says Tessler. “I was more interested in what love does to you when the love is considered by their peer group to be unorthodox or unsuitable.”
It is the week before opening night, and as is often the way with fringe theatre, the writer is mucking in to help with props. “I’m on my way out to see if I can get Layla a cheap wedding dress from a second-hand shop,” says Tessler. But this will not, it appears, be a marriage made in heaven.
“I became interested in how the relationship would play out against a background of hostility,” adds the writer. “So the play developed into tackling deeper issues.” Inspiration came partly from the campaign and support group Bereaved Families Forum which is composed of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones in the conflict. “These are the people who can speak more than anyone else,” says Tessler. “They’ll never stop being bereaved and yet they’ve managed to overcome their bitterness. I think the play is looking at these things in particular.”
Over the years Tessler has found her emotional relationship with Israel has changed, though not necessarily diminished. “I’m starting to think that Israel could be a more imaginative with the way it deals with the conflict. There is some kind of recognition for a Palestinian state but nothing that’s moving on the ground. I’m aware I sound like an armchair Zionist. Who the hell am I to criticise when I don’t live there? But I just feel that there has to be another way because the old way doesn’t work. When I was young and going to Israel the sense was that it’s up to the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue. There were 14 Arab countries and just one Israel. But with maturity you start thinking: ‘Can’t we be more proactive ourselves, by trying to build bridges?”
There is one character in the play called Joan, Max’s sister-in-law, who rather cruelly makes clear her disapproval of Max’s new relationship. Does Tessler expect to encounter a few Joans in the New End’s audience?
“They can throw tomatoes at me,” she jokes. “I hope the play is not too controversial. I don’t think being controversial for its own sake is helpful. It’s more a matter of getting into the depths. If people remain in their entrenched positions then maybe I’ve failed. Oh dear. Does that sound very arrogant of me?”
In the play — which is running at the New End at the same time as Daniel Cainer’s show Jewish Chronicles (see the interview on this page) — Layla, who like Max was formerly married, is tormented about the way the Palestinian/Israeli conflict affected her own family. Her relationship with a Jewish man is, in part, a way of dealing with this legacy.
Tessler knows about bereavement. In 2001 her ex-husband Richard, a wealthy solicitor, died when his car collided with an Eddie Stobart lorry on the M25. They had been divorced for nearly two years by the time of the accident. But they had been married for nearly 30 years. The terrible news came while Tessler was out with her son Rami. While they had lunch, Tessler received a phone call from her eldest daughter Daliah asking her to go home immediately and not to answer the phone. “I knew something was wrong. When I got home Daliah was waiting outside.”
But what made the death even more painful was the extra shock of finding that her ex-husband had signed a will leaving his entire estate, worth £7m according to newspaper reports, to his second wife. For Tessler it was all the more incomprehensible because Richard was still close to his children and their mother. A protracted legal battle followed, which, at the appeal stage ended with the children losing the case. “It was devastating,” remembers Tessler of the period following her husband’s death. “Someone once said: ‘Where there are children a marriage is never over.’ And there’s a lot of truth to that. I never really felt divorced.”
A year after the accident when the children visited the site where it took place, a Stobart lorry driver saw the girls standing by the road and gave them a flirtatious hoot of his horn.
These days the family have got on with their lives. Daliah is a jazz singer who released a CD called The Man I Never Knew, Donna works as the chaplain’s co-ordinator at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, and Rami is a drummer and percussionist with the band The Secret Cinema. “Aggressive rock, I call it,” says Tessler. “They fill the house [in Mill Hill] with music and energy and lots of laughter. More than anyone they’ve helped heal the past.”
