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Hannah ArendtMünchner StadtmuseumHannah Arendt in 1933[Missing Credit]

“There is a problem with being a Jew in England,” continues Pascal, creator of The Holocaust Trilogy and herself one of this country’s most respected theatre practitioners. “There is pressure to hide Jewishness and to not deal with the parental, grandparental, great-grandparental history, which is not honoured in the way that, say it is with Black history. There is a slight shame about being a Jew in England. Or there certainly was within my generation. And theatre is the public face of a country’s history.”

Perhaps Pinter is the wrong playwright for new Jewish playwrights to emulate. Pascal sees the East End-born Nobel laureate as one of those playwrights who often hid their Jewish identity. “He is seen as a Jewish playwright but actually, how little did he “come out” in his writing?” asks Pascal.

“I've studied all his plays, and it's very Jewish writing. But it has this blanket of assimilation. In a way, some of [Arthur] Miller's work is like that too. Certainly among the Jewish male [playwrighting] population there has been a history of blending in and not celebrating, and not owning Jewishness in a public and dramatic way. So I think there is great need for the programme.”

There is also work to be done on the number of Jewish female playwrights in the UK, just as there is on the number of women playwrights generally, adds Pascal. “I’m well known for believing in parity in drama. It’s not been spoken about much but here I am and I promote equal representation.”

Although the programme is aiming to support “emerging... early-career” playwrights above the age of 18 who will form the “next generation” of Jewish dramatists, Pascal is open to older writers “of diverse ages who may have a germ of a story rather than a fully fledged play”, which she says is often more interesting to work with as a director.

“I’m good at helping a writer find her or his own voice. I see my mentoring as a way of encouraging, exploring, experimenting to find what that voice is, or what the many voices are that we carry within us.”

Structure is often a key, overlooked element in the work of inexperienced playwrights says Pascal. So the dramatist will also be concentrating on finding “the right scaffolding” for a project.

“I always think of a play as a house. It can be Bauhaus, it can be a bungalow, it can be a skyscraper. What is it? Stage plays have structure and architecture.”

Being a Jewish playwright in England has become more difficult since October 7, says Pascal. There is a widespread view that being Jewish, and therefore a supporter of Israel means that “you’re a coloniser”, as the playwright puts it.

“I have found it more difficult to get my work on, that’s for sure. I’m not alone. I'm aware of a younger generation of theatre and film people who are talking about exactly the same thing. But there is resistance. While I’ve been casting my latest play I’ve been meeting quite a lot of young Jewish women [whose attitude is] ‘to hell with it’, ‘I’m not going to hide it’ and ‘I’m proud to be a Jew’, which I think is very healthy.”

Pascal says that it can feel like living in a fascist regime, only one where it is not the government that is antisemitic but the “friends, cohorts, liberal allies in the arts that have turned against us.”

The playwright sees parallels with the subject of her latest play. In 1933 a schism formed between Hannah Arendt and the German intellectual and academic world of which the Jewish thinker was part. Just as resistance has existed in the form of writing under communism, or film-making by Iranian artists, so writers who feel marginalised by the theatre establishment here can be part of an artistic reaction, says Pascal.

“We can't just take being cancelled. We have to fight back.”

Pascal’s play focuses on little known period of Arendt’s life after she was arrested in France in 1940. Along with the artist Charlotte Salomon who later killed in Auschwitz, she was transported to Camp Gurs along with many other people branded as “Undesirables”.

“What I discovered was that the French were also imprisoning Spanish republicans and some internationalists who were fleeing Franco. Camp Gurs was constructed for them. It was just huts and no bedding. And then just before the German invasion they transported the thousands of German Jews and anti-Nazis that were in France to the camp.”

This was 1940, not the later better known period of French collaboration with the Nazis.

“It's an area that the French have covered up – it’s a very dirty French story about what the French did [even] before Vichy.”

Like many of Pascal’s 24 plays the work has Jewish themes. The Shylock Play (2007) looked at Shakespeare’s problematic The Merchant of Venice through the eyes of a female Holocaust survivor while Crossing Jerusalem (2003) simultaneously conveyed both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Much like the Pascal canon, those who apply to the Jewish Playwrights Programme must engage with Jewish themes and/or culture. But Pascal, who was the first woman to direct at the National Theatre, is clear that a Jewish writer cannot help but be Jewish.

“You can’t wipe away Jewishness from lived experience,” she says. “Everything is the result of centuries of knowledge and culture that is derived from families who weren’t speaking English for 20 generations. So if you’re Jewish the work is going to be Jewish.”

Perhaps Pinter was the right example after all.

The Jewish Playwrights Programme is open to applicants until 5pm on August 3: https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/awards-prizes/jewish-playwrights-programme

The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 is at the Arcola Theatre from Oct 7

arcolatheatre.com/event/the-banality-of-evil/