The year that theatre came back - The Jewish Chronicle

As Covid receded (remember those halcyon days?) the theatre-going year did not begin in earnest until we were halfway through the calendar version. But after the doors of many theatres finally opened in June the following six months wracked up enough memories for double that time.
For me the first of these was not actually in a playhouse. It was just outside, at about midday in Piccadilly Circus after I stepped out of the Criterion Theatre. I had just completed my first face to face interview (with masks) in many months. It was with Audrey Brisson who was about to open in the title role in Amelie The Musical.
I had previously seen Brisson when she was playing Bella Chagall, wife of Marc in the gravity-defying (just like Chagall’s paintings) Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. Now in Brisson had been telling me that a show about people making connections was perfect for audiences who had been forced into solitude and social distancing.
As I walked, head down across Piccadilly Circus mentally replaying the interview, something grabbed my attention. Not a noise but silence. I looked up and there was not a soul walking, nor a bus or car driving. In Piccadilly Circus. In the middle of the day.
This lasted only for a minute, and then a little light human and road traffic appeared. But nothing has better illustrated to me the effect Covid has had on society than a deserted Piccadilly Circus, a place whose name was a byword for busy.
Still in the weeks and months that followed, theatres began to fill again. Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt resumed its West End run. (Although the latest news is that Covid has cruelly hit that show again with Omicron forcing the cancellation of its impending North American premiere in Toronto.) And as Patrick Marber’s production and other shows tempted UK audiences back to their seats there was a sense of revival in the air, not just for the shows but for a culture.

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For me that sense was fully realised at Bridge Theatre with the UK premiere of White Noise. Suzan-Lori Parks’s audacious play uses African American experience in the 21st century to skewer white complacency about the legacy of slavery.
To this pure joy was added when Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, his antidote to the Depression opened at the Barbican with a cast led by Broadway’s Sutton Foster and including Felicity Kendal in her first musical (If you missed it on stage, it was on television last week and you can still catch it on the BBC iPlayer).

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Publicising Anything Goes

On one of her days off during the show’s exhausting run Kendal told me how the little star of David she has occasionally worn throughout much of her career often prompted a response in rehearsal rooms that revealed as much about some of her peers as the star did about her.
‘We had no idea,’ people would tell her when they saw it, as if they had a very particular idea about what a Jew is and what a Jew is not. “And I think, ‘Why are you so surprised?’” said Kendal.
Perhaps the surprised carry within them what has now been labelled ‘unconscious bias’. Although not the kind that perpetuates antisemitic stereotype which was the version admitted to by the Royal Court when Al Smith’s play Rare Earth Mettle approached opening night.
This was the play whose central character Hershel Fink (since changed to Henry Finn) is a billionaire who profits from the harm he does to the world. The name has now become synonymous with the swill that swirls as even the most woke think about — although “unconsciously” we are assured — what a Jew is.

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For them Jew means the morally bankrupt billionaire who exploits the world’s poor. It is apparently not Stephen Sondheim or Sir Antony Sher.
Towards the end of 2021 both men died within a week of each other. Their loss will be felt into next year and far beyond.
I could happily end this look-back on such a downbeat note. And I would had not one more memory implanted itself, this time inside a theatre.
As Omicron surged elderly theatregoers, many of them Jewish, took their seats at the Hampstead Theatre to watch Tamsin Greig’s hugely enjoyable performance in Peggy For You. It was a display of pandemic-defying human spirit by what would be considered the most vulnerable part of society, albeit so full of vaccine it was a surprise it wasn’t dripping from their ears.
During the curtain call the cast applauded the audience as much as the other way round. Not a bad way to finish a short but memorable year.

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Theatre