Book Review: Global Jewish Plays: Five Works from Jewish Playwrights from around the World

Global Voices Theatre (GVT) is a female, non-binary, immigrant-led theatre company with a militant manifesto of opposing “the structural racism, classism, misogyny, ableism and xenophobia of the British theatre scene”. Their research of non-mainstream voices and translation efforts have highlighted sociopolitical issues that seldom make it onto the stage. The five plays in this volume and the companion podcast series, curated by Victor Esses, were all produced for the Bush Theatre’s “Global Jewish Voices” GVT season. 

These works vary both in ease of stage production and quality of the text, but are all undeniably original, even when tackling the well-trodden ground of Jewish identity, torn between tradition and individual self-definition. The stand-out plays in this regard are Extinct, by Philip Ishak Arditti and a People, by L.M. Feldman.

Arditti, a fine stage and TV actor, co-founder of London’s Arcola Theatre and co-author of English Kings Killing Foreigners for People Camden’s Theatre, sets Extinct in a joyous act of civil resistance in Istanbul during the Arab Spring of 2013, which was soon suppressed with disproportionate brutality by the police. Extinct is an extraordinary play within a very ordinary ‘family living room’ play structure. The exchanges between father and son portray the previous generation’s paranoia and desire to stay off the authorities’ radar, while working ‘behind the scenes’, and the younger generation’s drive to engage in civil disobedience in a host country. The tension in reconciling Jewish identity and the desire to be visible in public civic discourse is distilled in short, sharp lines. Father: “The community leaders have direct access to the prime minister! We control the temperature of their relations with Israel and with the US, that’s where we get our power from, not from shouting in the streets”. Son: “You are deluded!”… “But nobody sees us! Are we still here if we are hiding all the time?”… “Doesn’t feel like we are here. Feels like we’re extinct.”

Feldman’s a People, conversely, is an experimental piece of choral writing. Crossing centuries and geographies, the swift changes of context are given an anchor in Jewish rituals, Yiddish words, proverbs and blessings. Both illustration and celebration of the Jewish diaspora’s adapting to the various host cultures while retaining an identity, the driving insight of Feldman’s play is that of Judaism as itself an essentially contested concept. Far from being immutable, it has shifted throughout the centuries, requiring re-definition and re-invention. We are shown a people defined not by shared spiritual and philosophical beliefs, but by formal, extrinsic social bonds. 

The least successful of the five plays is Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker’s 1933 play The Kahena: Berber Queen. Despite the fascinating background both of Kahena, a seventh century warrior queen fighting the Umayyad Caliphate and the author, part of the Berber Jewry  intelligentsia, being the first woman to be published in Algeria and a member of the Algerian resistance movement to colonial France, the dissonant translation into English makes this an impossibly hard text to read, act or enjoy. 

Sarah Gabriella Waisvisz’ Heartlines: A Love Story, has the deft flow of a love forced underground by society’s conventions. It is a most enjoyable and entertaining piece of historical theatre, dedicated to the bravery of its two female leads in sabotaging German garrisons in WWII Jersey. 

Papa’gina, by Hana Vazana Grunvald is a delicate, personal picture of family life and small erotic secrets in Jaffa, where Israel and Palestine’s cultural differences blur and blend into each other, and where Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jews grow up and learn to love. This play is a bold and beautiful affirmation of how Jewish-Arab love is as inevitable as hate seems now. 

Book editor: Global Voices Theatre
Publisher and Imprint: Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama
Series: Drama and Performance Studies
Publication date: 2024
ISBN: 9781350383302