Mick Hartley

Kate Maltby in the Sunday Times gives us The inside story of the Royal Court Theatre’s antisemitism. It's the sorry tale of their new production, Rare Earth Mettle, which originally featured an avaricious, megalomaniac American billionaire who's name was, um, Hershel Fink. It hadn't occurred to anyone that this was a stereotypical Jewish name (Hadley Freeman on Twitter: “I guess the name Shylock Shlomo Liebergoldbergstein was already taken”), and that an element of antisemitism might possibly be involved. Rich, nasty, money-grabbing…Jewish. Well yes, you can see the problem. When it was pointed out to the Royal Court innocents, they apologised profusely and changed the name.

Under fire, the Royal Court scrambled. Late that night it issued a brief statement apologising for the use of an antisemitic name. (The playwright Patrick Marber tweeted in response: “The name ‘Hershel Fink’ is not ‘antisemitic’. But you are.”) The Court insisted that its greedy billionaire was not intended to be Jewish and that it had immediately changed the name to Henry Finn. No matter that for many people of Jewish heritage, who have experienced generations of pressure to anglicise their names, the sudden erasure of a Jewish name to skirt a problem brought more painful associations.

A more thoughtful response followed the next day. The theatre apologised unreservedly — “It was a mistake, it shouldn’t have happened, and we are sorry it did” — and promised to “stand in solidarity with our Jewish staff, artists, audiences and friends”, saying it would pursue a period of reflection.

But questions lingered. The theatre’s first statement had conceded that the choice of a Jewish name for an avaricious character “is an example of unconscious bias”. Few were convinced. Unconscious? The Court bills itself as the UK’s top centre for new theatre writing — most plays that reach the main stage have spent years in development. This project had been in the works since at least 2016. A quick google reveals that Hershel is a Yiddish name, meaning little deer.

If this was a blind spot, it was a bad one. It suggests a theatre community in which Jewish signifiers have become a natural shorthand to describe evil capitalists, “unconsciously” indicating greed.

The Royal Court is known for its deep relationship with the British left — and like many institutions of the British left, has recently been shadowed by questions about past associations with alleged antisemites. The director Ken Loach, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was expelled from the Labour Party this year. A statement of intent by Keir Starmer’s new post-Corbyn leadership, it was the culmination of years of distress expressed by British Jews going back to Perdition, a play Loach had developed as a director at the Royal Court in 1987, which seemed to accuse Hungarian Jewish leaders of collaboration with the Nazis in 1944. That play was cancelled; Loach publicly blamed “the Zionist lobby”.

There is indeed a history here, and it's not just Perdition. Much more recently, in 2009, the Royal Court featured Caryl Churchill's short agitprop play Seven Jewish Children, described variously by critics as a "blood libel", "the mainstreaming of the worst anti-Jewish stereotypes — for instance, that Jews glory in the shedding of non-Jewish blood", "an open vilification of the Jewish people… drawing upon an atavistic hatred of the Jews", that would "stoke the fires of antisemitism".

Or read Howard Jacobson's contemptuous dismissal of what he had no problem in characterising as an antisemitic work.

So it's more than a little surprising that Seven Jewish Children doesn't get a mention here. Though Maltby's conclusion is fair:

Another Royal Court insider told me that everyone was prostrate with guilt. “These are good people — the people who work here — they are good people, so of course they are devastated to have caused such hurt.” As with so many institutions of the post-Corbyn left, perhaps the problem is the very conviction that the Royal Court already belongs to the “good people”.