A selection of fine plays from a talented Jewish playwright, given resonance by current political climes.Summary
Rating
Excellent
It is a brave director who will produce a play by a Jewish playwright at a time of heightened conflict in Palestine. Methuen Press have ensured some of the finest, such as Ryan Craig’s four “comic tragedies”, remained in print.
Three of his four plays focus on Jewish identity while living in Britain and being British.
What We Did to Weinstein (2005) is the play which brought Craig to the critics’ attention. It touches upon the persecution of London’s East End Jewish community by Moseley’s Black Shirts, Muslim radicalisation in the UK, the Second Intifada, Camp David and Rabin’s murder by a Jewish Settler. Centrally and poignantly, however, it deals with the impossible predicament of those British Jews who “make Aliyah” – settle in Israel and join the Israeli Defence Force – yet are never accepted as true Israelis, ultimately regarded as foreigners in what they may have felt was their one and only motherland. With its parent-child dynamics and time-bending narrative of 2002 military action in the West Bank, interrupted by flash-backs to 1994 West London, it is a virtuoso piece of theatre as well as a dissection of the Jewish diaspora’s fragmented support for Israel.
The Holy Rosenbergs is simply jaw-dropping in the way it dives head-first into the ideological rifts between Jews who condemn Israel defence policies and those who argue in favour of a brute-force response. Written in the wake of the 2009 report into the Gaza War by the Jewish International Criminal Lawyer Richard Goldstone (later barred from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah on account of it), this is a work about the high cost of criticising Israel’s politics: being ostracised by one’s own community. The dialogues in this one remarkable evening move deftly along a forensic analysis of the laws of war, the need by the International Community to hold Israel to higher standards than other conflict parties, and the reasons why some no longer believe in dialogue with the Palestinian side. This is an astonishingly brave play, intellectually sharp while not overbearing, and it is simply lacerating to see words penned in 2011 still true in 2024 as though time has not moved a beat.
Filthy Business (2017), a loosely autobiographical play, introduces us to Yetta. A larger-than-life, unstoppable, blinkered, asphyxiating, destructive matriarch entrepreneur, she stops at nothing to hold her family together. Her protectiveness includes lying to each of her children about the other, blackmailing them into the family business, defrauding insurers and “accidentally” severing her eldest son’s trigger finger, ensuring he is not drafted and safe from war. This family’s dialogues, in a vivacious East End vernacular interspersed with Yiddish, simply leap out of the script, while Yetta’s character will stalk you for days. You do not need to have met a Yetta to know she is real.
In Charlotte and Theodore (2023), it is not Jewish identity that plays out but the ethical toll exacted on women by professional institutional roles and how ill-equipped male identity is to support them on this.
Despite its lightness of touch, of Craig’s plays this is probably the one that will resonate least with readers outside of academia. For those inside it, it will likely be too close to the bone to be enjoyable. A sparkling two-hander, censorship, freedom of expression, and cancel culture within Universities are brought to life and handled so sensitively that we feel for both characters in equal measure.
Craig remains unsurpassed among Jewish contemporary playwrights and, should he tackle the Israeli-Hamas war in a new play it will be well worth hopping on a plane for.
Book author: Ryan Craig
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, Methuen Press
Collection: Drama and Performance Studies
Publication year: 2024
ISBN: 9781350431331
