Jewish dramatists

J is for Jewish dramatists

Just as Jewish folk culture influenced Hollywood cinema, modern theatre has also been shaped by Yiddish tradition

Michael Billington

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 February 2012 14.11 GMT


'Is there a Jewish theatrical identity, or are there simply a lot of talented writers who are Jews?' Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup with Barley at the Royal Court theatre in 2011. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

At the moment there is a rather under-valued play by Nicholas Wright, Travelling Light, playing at the National Theatre. It shows how Jewish folk culture, which flourished in the shtetls of eastern Europe, influenced Hollywood cinema. Watching the play, I wondered if a similar argument could be made for the modern theatre. How much, in short, has it been shaped by Yiddish tradition?

In America, there is a reasonably clear-cut progression. Between 1881 and 1903, well over a million Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived in the USA. Many of them settled in New York's Lower East Side, and a vigorous theatrical culture emerged. Plays, often incorporating songs and dealing with problems of exile and assimilation, were hugely popular. And although integration led to the decline of Yiddish theatre and a corresponding diaspora of second and third-generation talent, it is virtually impossible to think of modern American theatre without the influence of Jewish artists.

The list is long and impressive. Jewish dramatists include Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Neil Simon; composers range from George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein to Jerry Bock and Stephen Sondheim. The critic-director Harold Clurman, who co-founded the Group Theatre, the acting guru Lee Strasberg and the designer Boris Aaronson – all helped shape modern American theatre. And today Tony Kushner stands as a supreme example of a writer who, in plays ranging from Angels in America to The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, has managed to fuse sex, politics and religion in a way that might be described as definably Jewish.

But what of Britain? In one way, there was a similar pattern to America in that immigrants created a Yiddish theatre, opposed by the rabbis and often radical in content, in London's East End. That tradition declined around 1914. But even if Jewish talent has never dominated British theatre in quite the same way as in America, what you find post-1945 is the emergence of a new generation of writers, including Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Steven Berkoff and Bernard Kops who are the products of a working-class, East End, Jewish world.

As a non-Jew, I am wary of offering generalisations, but I see a distinction between Jewish dramatists and dramatists who are Jewish. I would place Arnold Wesker in the first category in that many of his plays derive their vitality from their cultural specificity. Wesker's early piece, Chicken Soup With Barley (1956), brilliantly links the disintegration of a Jewish family with the disillusion with the idea of a socialist utopia. In 1977's The Merchant he offers a defiant response to what he regards as anti-semitism inherent in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. And, in a recent work like Badenheim 1939, based on a novel by Aharom Appelfeld, he charts the insulation of middle-class bohemian Jews from the catastrophe that was then ensuing under the Nazis.

Harold Pinter is a rather different case. As a Jew, he was vehemently opposed to any form of antisemitism: he once threw a glass of whisky in the face of a drunken Irish actor who called him "a filthy Yid". But, although Pinter's work was informed by his experience of growing up in a post-war London where fascism still posed a threat, he always resisted any attempt to interpret his plays in specifically Jewish terms. The Homecoming was a case in point. Although often seen as a portrayal of a north London Jewish family, and the problems that arise from "marrying out", Pinter adamantly maintained that his play had a much wider social resonance.

The question of what makes a play Jewish is one I don't feel competent to answer. But what is clear, even if one confines oneself to Britain and America, is modern theatre's heavy dependence on Jewish writers. And, since those dramatists are the descendants of immigrant families, it is fascinating to speculate on how much an inherited sense of exile, loss and isolation offers a key to their work. Is there, in fact, such a thing as a Jewish theatrical identity? Or are there simply a lot of talented writers who are Jews?