Would you convert for a place in a good school? - The Jewish Chronicle

The world has changed since Alexis Zegerman last had a play on in north London. Called Lucky Seven, it opened at the Hampstead Theatre in 2008 and was inspired by Michael Apted’s 1960s televised social experiment Seven Up in which the cameras returned to children from different backgrounds every seven years documenting their progress, changes in their circumstances and in the country too.

The play was on before the full effects of the financial crash had been felt; when the idea of Britain leaving the EU was a fantasy of the politically irrelevant, the notion of Trump in the White House was too ridiculous to be a prophecy or even a joke, and before the Labour Party struck more anxiety into the hearts of British Jews than the NF, BNP and EDL put together — an anxiety that Zegerman’s new play, Holy Sh!t taps into.

“Someone came up to me at the theatre last night and said ‘That antisemitism stuff, it’s so current,’” says Zegerman, who about ten years ago was an actor who also wrote, but these days is more of a writer who also acts.

She was in Mike Leigh’s National Theatre play about north London Jews Two Thousand Years, and later this year she can be seen as a “Golders Green frummer” in the movie Disobedience starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams.

But it’s the writing that has kept her busy, adapting Mark Lamprell’s novel A Lover’s Guide to Rome for American film producers Anonymous Content (who made Revenant and Spotlight) and she’s been “doing a telly job in New York recently,” adapting Richard Morais’s novel Buddhaland Brooklyn.

But her latest play is very much on home turf. Directed by Kiln’s artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, it’s about a Jewish couple Simone and Sam, who become practising Christians in order to get their child into a decent school.

Holy Sh!t opens Kiln Theatre’s new season after a two year, £7 million refit. The comedy’s promotional material turns the ‘i’ in the play’s title into an exclamation mark in an attempt to avoid causing offence.

Meanwhile, the word “Kiln”, the natty name by which the theatre formerly known as The Tricycle must now be known, has caused much offence even though its ‘i’ is the right way up. The change has drawn protests from those who see the decision as a betrayal of the theatre’s heritage, although Zergerman is not one of them.

“I love the new name! That things evolve as the world changes around us is absolutely right. I feel honoured that my play is opening the new Kiln Theatre,” she says.

Despite starting the play three years ago it chimes strongly with the current rise in antisemitism.

“To me there is clearly a problem,” she says. “It feels like people are not being listened to. When you are in a majority and you’re not listening to a minority, you’ve got a big problems, because you can’t tell people how to feel. Everyone in my play has deep feelings and no one feels like they are being listened to. And that’s where the problem is.”

The play begins as a “middle class comedy of manners” but turns progressively darker as Zegerman explores racism.

“I go there. I really explore that in the play. When I started writing, it wasn’t tapping into the unfortunate stuff that’s going on in the Labour Party now. It’s sort of a dark coincidence. Not a happy one, obviously. [But] I’m pleased the play explores it.”

While writing, events in the Labour Party forced her to reassess her relationship with the party.

“Sir Keir Starmer is my MP and he’s fabulous, so it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t vote Labour,” she says. But Zegerman is no longer a member of the party she has “always voted for.”

She left it after Shami Chakrabarti, now Baroness Chakrabarti, delivered her inquiry into antisemitism at a Labour Party event.

“There was antisemitic heckling and seemingly nothing was done about that when one of Corbyn’s own MPs came under attack,” says Zegerman.

“I lost confidence completely.”

Still, Holy Sh!t is not a play about the Labour Party. It’s about the lengths to which people go in order to get their children into a decent school.

“The idea came about when I was pregnant with my first child,” says the playwright.

“We were moving house and people kept asking me, ‘Is there a good school nearby?’ The baby was still in utero.

“I had no idea who she was and it seemed like a really alarming question.

“But it was such a hot topic of conversation I realised that this issue was going to hit me. And I knew I wanted to write a play abut race and identity, so I felt that was a good way in.”

The Jews in Zegermen’s play are culturally Jewish. “But their identity comes to mean more to them” as they ask what it means to be Jewish in Britain,” says Zegerman. It’s a question that has been been the subject of much conversation between Zegerman and her Jewish friends, she says.

Unlike some Jews, she has no desire to leave Britain. Her husband, Reuters journalist Peter Graff, is a Jewish New Yorker and her children, four-year-old Lola and one-year-old Morris have dual British and American citizenship.

But, says Zegerman, “I am British and I am Jewish.

“And I don’t think they are mutually exclusive things and I hope that remains the same. Always.

“This is home. I’d be devastated to feel that its wasn’t.

“To quote the play, I feel you have to stay here and fight it.”

Holy Sh!t is at the Kiln Theatre until October 6

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