The second Emanate season of Jewish plays is about to begin. The first happened almost exactly one year ago when two Jewish drama graduates Dan Wolff and Sam Thorpe-Spinks came to the view that Jewish writing was not getting a fair showing on British stages.

Motivated in part by the decidedly unfriendly and ignorant attitudes towards Jews they encountered while studying at drama school the two young actors resolved to create a festival of new Jewish writing.

To host it they were given a stage at north London’s Kiln Theatre (actually a platform in front of the venue’s cinema screen). Over two days of sometimes raw but always fizzing theatre, performed in front of packed audiences the works and works-in-progress of Jewish writers were performed by Jewish actors, many of them on the cusp of their careers.

The thrilling result revealed a talent pool of British Jewish theatre practitioners that is as deep as it is rich.  Just as significantly British Jewish playwrights were freed of having to mould their Jewish sensibility to fit a wider theatre culture that is fundamentally incurious about modern Jewish identity. 

And while it might have once been claimed that the dearth of Jewish experience in British theatre could be ascribed  to a paucity of Jewish writing, Emanate proved that actually the writing and talent exist in abundance. What was missing was the willingness of Britain’s artistic directors to put Jewish voices on their stages.

The second Emanate, for which Wolff and Thorpe-Spinks have been joined by Jewish producer Tanya Truman, features three big-name playwrights who were featured at last year’s event. Amy Rosenthal, Alexis Zegerman— whose acting chops are on display in the hit thriller series Hijack — and Ryan Craig have each produced a short play about Birth (Rosenthal), Marriage (Zegerman) and Death (Craig), which will be staged under the umbrella title The Arc:  A Trilogy of Jewish Plays.

Abigail Weinstock, Dan Wolff, Adrian Schiller, (c) Lexi Clare

Abigail Weinstock, Dan Wolff and Adrian Schiller (Photo: Lexi Clare)

This time Emanate will be a much slicker affair: three fully produced plays directed by Kayla Feldman performed on a highly reputable stage (Soho Theatre which appropriately enough used to be a synagogue), and with an impressive cast that includes Nigel Planer, Caroline Gruber, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Abigail Weinstock and also Thorpe-Spinks and Wolff.

I spoke to the three playwrights about how they approached the task of writing a play about three of life’s milestones as seen through a Jewish lens.

John Nathan: Hello, here we are again talking about theatre and Jewish writing.  Now be honest: Have these three plays been sitting in your drawer of unmade plays?

Ryan Craig: How cynical of you, John.

Amy Rosenthal: I really don’t have a drawer

Alexis Zegerman: That’s not how it works.

RC:  It’s funny.  People do say that and I do know writers who have a drawer. But I really don’t have one.

AR: I wish I had a drawer.

AZ: It wasn’t me who said this, but if every single commissioned movie that I’d written had gone into production I’d be a very wealthy writer.  You don’t get to hold on to them.  So somebody else has my drawer.  So no, this has been a very well thought- out process.

AR: We were given a kind of prompt.  Last year, we were all bursting with a specific thing each of us wanted to say. It  just kind of flew out like someone had just punched us on the back.  This year none of us were in that space. So we got together and talked about how there could be a connection between our three pieces. It was Ryan’s wife who had the brilliant idea of birth, marriage and death to give us an arc. So we each picked one. I’ve got birth.

AZ: I’ve got marriage.

RC: And I’m doing death.

Amy Rosenthal

Amy Rosenthal (Photo: Handout)

AR: The last Emanate, which felt so urgent and which was very quick in its development, came out of a sudden awakening about antisemitism in the [theatre] industry.  Of course, all that hasn’t gone anywhere it’s just that we felt we tackled it at that moment. And with only three writers on this show we wanted to give the audience a journey.  Luckily we all know each other.

RC: It was great because the meetings were really gossipy. So over two days we just told each other anecdotes. Alexis told an anecdote about a date — am I allowed to say that?  And Amy and I said, “That’s your play.” And it happened to all of us. We were telling anecdotes and didn’t know they were plays.  It was a good process. It’s hard to come up with ideas anyway, so when you’re forced into a sort of framework it’s quite useful. You don’t want too much freedom.

AZ: Otherwise you’re wrestling with a million possibilities.

AR: Mine didn’t come up quite like that. I think after Alexis got marriage and Ryan told a funny anecdote about death I was like “OK, I’ll take birth”.   Then,  panicked. I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have kids. What have I got to say?  I sat twitching in the car and remembered on the way home that I’d been born myself and that was a good way in.

RC: We have these big moments in life with certain rules and expectations around them and each of the plays is a slight distortion of those rituals.

Ryan Craig

Ryan Craig (Photo: Handout)

AZ: We know Emanate is a coming together of Jewish creatives but we none of us set out to write something that was obviously tackling Jewishness necessarily. However, my play is two people on a date. And the question it toys with is: “Is it the diaspora’s responsibility to keep Jewishness going?”  That’s a really big question. Obviously, I don’t hit it on the nose but that was the bigger question I was grappling with in my head.

AR: Whatever any of us write is just going to be Jewish. That’s in us. Mine is about a retired obstetrician and his wife who receive a surprise visit from someone from their past.

AZ: Because the original question we were given [by the producers] was “Should we be Jewish tomorrow?”

RC: I think you’ll find it was “Tomorrow, comma, should we be Jewish?”

AZ: Ah yes, sorry.  It was more Jewish than that.

RC:  I didn’t know we had a choice, so I didn’t really understand the question. But we sort of grappled with it.

JN: So this year Emanate is not the urgent enquiry into the Jewish condition that it was last year. Is that fair?

AR: I think they [the producers] have allowed and encouraged us to consider Jewishness without the weight of responsibility to be, to say something … desolate.

RC: My characters are obsessing about death in what I think is a Jewish way, but one hopes that there’s a universality.

AZ: Because everybody is born, everybody hooks up with someone and then they die.

Alexis headshot

Alexis Zegerman: (Photo: Handout)

RC: I’ve always wanted to write without looking at the past. Something personal, something that I’ve understood from my own experience.  I’ve never wanted my character to be victims, even though they are victim to some things, some prejudices or some vicissitudes of life. I know this is unfashionable.

AR: I totally agree with you. I felt that really strongly as well.

JN: How do you look back at last year’s Emanate?

AR: For me it was something to do with joy. Everything in it was serious and profound, but it wasn’t whinging. It was just a kind of a pleasure and had a lightness of touch but also it had a desire to entertain and was free of axe-grinding.

RC: It was a real watershed moment. Because I do feel I can write from the inside now without having to have some kind of really big headline subject that justifies its place on the stage.

AR: I think and hope that this one has the same energy about an energy

AZ: This time Emanate is not a scratch night. It’s a properly rehearsed show with a great cast.  We are talking about a good night out at the theatre.

The Arc: A Trilogy of New Jewish Plays is at The Soho Theatre from August 15 to 26. sohotheatre.com