Diaspora dramaturgy for the twenty-first century
A new generation of Jewish theatre-makers emerges.
Jewishness on stage is nothing new. Musicals like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and The Producers are, in different ways, predicated on a certain access to Jewish references. Playwrights like Miller and Kafka have found their place in the modern Western canon, and deal with deeply Jewish themes. Jewishness, it seems, can provide a wonderful mechanism for creating popular media.
Often, though, that Jewishness is sidelined in order for the story to have widespread appeal. The Jewishness is ancillary; it is useful in small doses, as a framework or the basis for a certain kind of humour, but it must not stand alone.
This layer-cake approach speaks to a fundamental tension in Diaspora Jewish dramaturgy. How do we remain true to ourselves — our culture, our vocabulary, our idiosyncrasies in all their richness — and still appeal to a mainstream audience? What can we compromise? What can we not?
These are the questions that interest director Emma Jude Harris. Hailing from Los Angeles, and university-educated in New York, Emma was brought up on gallows humour and Mel Brooks films which instilled in her the notion that, as she puts it, “we’re going to turn our trauma into something really fucking entertaining.” From a “Talmudic fascination” with close reading and a realisation that she could participate in the artistic world as something other than a performer, Emma found her footing as a director. Her practice is shaped by where she has come from, where she is, and where she is going.
Emma now lives and works in London, and her perspective on the diasporic experience is informed by a plethora of influences. Zooming in on Jewishness, Emma feels that there is an order of representation. Ashkenazi experiences are privileged, with Ashkenazi Americans and, ultimately, Ashkenazi American men seeing the most of themselves on stage and screen. “I saw a lot more representation of myself [in the US] than British Jewish women ever do,” she says. “There’s really not a lot, and I’ve become very aware of that wound and that lack of representation.”
Appropriately, her most recent project, REVENGE: After the Levoyah, is Anglo-Jewish to its core. A farce-heist-comedy packed into one hour of quick-witted, Yiddish-speaking multi-roling, this wonderful play tells the tale of a plot to kidnap Jeremy Corbyn. I won’t spoil the story — here’s hoping that after its run being extended at The Yard, you’ll be able to catch Revenge elsewhere at some point — but the headache-inducing intricacy of the situation is explored on stage with dexterity and flair.
Emma’s own discomfort with antisemitism in the UK and her research into the history of Jews in England informs her understanding of the myriad reactions to Corbyn. It is in England, she says, where she first grappled with antisemitism as a “living thing”. She points to the expulsion of all Jewish people from 1290 until 1656: “I only know that because I was like, why is it so weird here? And then had to look it up,” she admits. “It’s a medieval prejudice here, and therefore there’s loads of stacked layers of trauma. And understanding this as some ancient, primordial force means that this stuff has deep, deep, deep roots that we maybe aren’t quite acknowledging, or that many people aren’t even aware of.”
These roots are part of what makes melding Britishness and Jewishness such a balancing act. REVENGE, Emma explains, was influenced by the need to “offset” some of its Jewishness for a general comprehensibility, like those shows above. “The heist element and the farce element are legible to all audiences, and that was something I really wanted — to have multiple points of access,” she explains. “If you don’t understand a Yiddish joke, or a Jewish funeral ritual, that’s fine, because there’ll be something stacked in the next couple of comedic beats that either appeals to the basic idea of physical comedy or to this heist dramaturgy. We were operating on three tiers, the idea being to never go too long without giving something to each tier, with the recognition that different audience groups take different things from it.” This does seem to be the way to do it — but is there a world in which we can occupy more than a third of our own space? And, if that world were one we might find onstage, could we reconcile it with the fragmented reality of modern Judaism? Paradoxically, would being centred in all of our cultural particularity feel true to our experience?
One related issue here is that much of what might, on its face, appear to be “Jewish theatre” is not, in fact, for Jewish audiences. London is a hub of this kind of work. Tom Stoppard, who was in his fifties when he learned that he was Jewish, and that all four of his grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps, effectively processes the news of his ancestry in real time through his play Leopoldstadt. Tracy Ann Obermann’s Merchant of Venice draws clumsy, wobbly lines between the antisemitism of the 1590s, the 1930s, and the 2020s with all the agility and nuance of a three-year-old. Audiences can spend hundreds of pounds on a table for two and a three-course-dining experience to luxuriate at a showing of Cabaret. Non-Jewish audience members may leave with a sense of enlightenment — “That was quite, like, sad,” said the family who had sat behind me at the Kit Kat Club as we drifted out of the theatre — but we are learning nothing new.
That isn’t to say these productions are useless or by any means worthless; there is arguable merit in all of these approaches. But one thing is undeniable: they are for gentiles, not for Jews. You don’t have to tell us. We know.
The key to challenging this status quo, Emma says, is to return power to creatives as part of a general systemic change. “Critics need to do anti-racist training. Unless we have robust theatre criticism that is able to think carefully and intersectionally, there is only so much we can achieve.” That isn’t all: “Venues need to start investing in Jewish artists when they have ideas that are seeds,” she continues, “not just when they’re fully fledged trees that have proven they can sell out.” And, crucially, the space allotted for Jewish work needs to be shared out, not just traded back and forth between the few big names who occupy the space. “The mainstream Jewish work that gets put on is by mainstream Jewish celebrities — often an ego-project of sorts,” Emma says. “They achieve that success, and then pull the ladder up behind them.”
Instead of an individual-centric approach, her dream is an “ecosystem” of Jewish artists, all making work. “I’m not suggesting that we all hold hands and make challah and help each other,” she explains, “but that rather than these star vehicles who represent one person and exorcise that person’s particular demons and trauma, we need to invest in artists at all stages of their career.”
Which is to say: there needs to be more, and some of it should be rubbish. “Multiplicity is such a good thing, and the more Jewish stories we have the better. In scarcity, there’s much more pressure for success. I’d love for there to be enough Jewish work that some of it can be terrible, and that it doesn’t all need to centre Jewishness, and we don’t need to do this whole thing of respectability politics.”
Maybe this is where we are heading. As a new generation of Jewish theatre-makers emerges, they bring a desire to refresh, revitalise and reimagine. Jewishness on stage can feel more modern; with history never far from the surface, we can tread old ground in new and exciting ways. We can also, with a bit of luck, move into a landscape that is simply more joyful. The discourse around Jewish representation in theatre has historically been centred on breaches, failures, and mistakes — but Emma is hopeful that we may be progressing towards works that are meaningfully Jewish, in which the mainstream and specificity are not mutually exclusive, and no experience needs to take up less space. ▼
Hannah Davis (she/her) is a third-year Spanish student at Oxford University.
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