In a south London theatre the stage has been converted to a north London Jewish sitting room.
The set is so well observed by designer Tim Shortall that to walk into the auditorium of the Menier Chocolate Factory is like stepping through a science fiction portal. Only instead of being transported to a future world orbited by ringed planets you are confronted by a highly polished faux antique dining table and quasi-rococo sofa of an Edgware living room. A display cabinet contains Judaica. Peeling paper in the corner of the room suggests appearances are not quite being kept up despite the newly installed corinthian pillars that grace the front door off stage. Welcome to the home of the Rosenbergs.
You wouldn’t immediately know it for all the human traffic that travels into and out of the living room but kosher caterer David (Nicholas Woodeson) and his wife Lesley (Tracy-Ann Oberman) are mourning the death of their son Danny who died in Gaza while fighting for Israel.
The rabbi of the local synagogue is worried about Danny’s forthcoming memorial service for which David and Lesley’s daughter Ruth (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) has returned home. Protestors are expected. Not the anti-Israel kind, though they may pitch up too. But the anti-Ruth kind.
Ruth, a lawyer, is helping an enquiry into alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Many members of the community in which she was raised feel betrayed. Welcome also to The Holy Rosenbergs by Ryan Craig, a play that dares to explore the moral conscience of diaspora Jews when Israel is at war.
The work feels fresher and more urgent than it did when it received its premiere at the National Theatre in 2011 following Israel’s war in Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
“Although the issues are burningly the same, it's ten times more intense than it was then,” says the play’s Jewish director Lindsay Posner. “There weren't as many people killed. Although the issues were publicised it hadn't had the kind of global impact with social media that the situation has now.”
When Craig was commissioned to write the play by the National’s then artistic director Sir Nicholas Hytner, the playwright had already forged a career largely informed by works dealing with the toughest and knottiest issues facing diaspora Jews. None of them have gone away.
The Glass Room (2006) which premiered at Hampstead Theatre tackled Holocaust denial; the heroine of his 2017 play Filthy Business is Yetta Solomon, a first generation Jewish immigrant who uses morally dubious tactics to force her family to keep the business she founded running. However the first time Craig tackled the complicated relationship some British Jews can have with Israel was with his play What We Did To Weinstein which premiered in 2005 at the very theatre where his Rosenbergs play is now being revived. The play pretty much launched Craig’s career winning him an Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright award.
Like The Holy Rosenbergs it too features a British-born Jew who fights for Israel, and it too reflects a burden which it could be said no British community other than Jews have to endure; that of being made to feel responsible for the policies of a nation state which it feels a deep connection to but over which it has no control. It’s a struggle that has caused deep divides in the community. Who would be a diaspora Jew?
“Both plays have a similar intention,” says Craig sitting in a corner of the Menier’s cosy foyer. “I wanted to lay out polarised viewpoints in order to find that mystical area of common ground that I think is missing. I think I have to give myself a little pat on the back. I was a bit ahead of the game because I could see that coming. And it has got a lot worse.”
Craig remembers conversations from as far back as the 1980s with fellow Jewish schoolboys about Israel. “Words like ‘traitor’ and ‘betrayer’ would be used,” remembers Craig. “This is a play about the consequences of not listening as much as anything else. At a recent family gathering Posner’s brother-in-law and sister became locked in moral combat over Israel.
“The Israel-Palestine conflict can create raw division between people who are close friends and lovers and relatives that people have stopped speaking to each other because of it, I just think, ‘Well the problem is that you've stopped being able to listen,” says Craig.
When Craig wrote The Holy Rosenbergs, he was responding “very specifically to the Goldstone Report”, the enquiry led by the former South African judge into alleged war crimes – Israeli and Palestinian - in Gaza 13 years ago. As with Craig’s play which features an enquiry with a similar remit there was widespread fierce Jewish objection to the moral equivalence being drawn between Israel and Hamas as well as deep Jewish unease about the “collateral damage” of Israel’s actions.
“I’d been watching Jeremy Bowen on BBC,” says Craig. “He was talking about this South African judge who was running the report into war crimes in Gaza and who was also a religiously observant Jew. My playwright's brain, just went, ‘What happens when he goes home on Friday night?’”.
Weeks after Hytner commissioned the play Craig was at his writing desk when he received a phone call from a friend. The friend said that “life is writing your play because I’ve just heard that if Goldstone goes to his grandson’s barmitzvah in Johannesburg [Jewish] protesters are going to picket the synagogue.’ I thought ‘that’s the dilemma’. Of course, I fictionalised it and set in Edgware which is a milieu I know well.”
The result is what might be called Craig’s Arthur Miller play. The Rosenberg’s patriarch David has a monumentally misplaced belief that he is well thought of by people who actually don’t think of him at all. In that sense he’s very much like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. There is also an element of Miller’s All My Sons in which the reckoning over a son’s death reveals a father’s devastating moral responsibility.
“David is partially Willy Loman, but he’s partially people I grew up with; people who wanted to be upbeat and talk everything up despite the truth of circumstances.”
In David’s case that truth includes his precarious financial situation. His Jewish clientele has drifted away from him. He desperately needs to close a deal to cater for a high profile local wedding, which he thinks should be no problem as the father of the bride, a wealthy doctor, is a childhood friend whose street battles with antisemites David fought on his friend’s behalf.
“That's what I think is so strong about the piece,” says Posner. “It is essentially a domestic tragedy in the tradition of Arthur Miller. The political issues are argued on every side but most importantly the play reminds us of the human cost to those involved.”
The Holy Rosenbergs is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until May 2
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