Julia Pascal is a British playwright, director and scholar. Growing up in Blackpool and Manchester, she trained as an actor and worked as a journalist before becoming a playwright and theatre director, and was the first woman to direct a performance at the National Theatre.
Her work centres on war, exile and marginalised voices, especially women. We at the East End Review put a few questions to her ahead of the premiere of her new play The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 at the Arcola in October.
The play is set in the six-week window between the Armistice and the Occupation in 1940, and focuses on the state internment of “enemy aliens” – stateless refugees held in camps built originally for Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco. The action centres on Gurs, the largest of these camps. As Pascal explains, the arrests of German Jews who had sought sanctuary in France “shows the xenophobia of the state even before the country was occupied” – a history she calls “shameful” for the French.
The play imagines a meeting between three women interned there: “Hannah Arendt […] was to become one of the most important political theorists of her age. Charlotte Salomon was an unknown artist whose marvellous works were discovered after her murder in Auschwitz […] The character I have written as Eva Daube is a 16 year old Communist.” Pascal frames them as “the Intellectual, the Artist and the Political Activist.”
The idea was sparked by a family member. Pascal’s cousin David Daube mentioned his aunt Eva’s internment while on holiday in France – “one of those casual remarks that had a huge impact on me.” She had “read widely about France’s 20th century history but had never heard of Gurs,” and filling in that gap led her to Arendt’s time there too. Her connection to Eva Daube physicalised as her research deepened: “I held the very paper in my hand that she had typed. This gave me a visceral connection to her.”
Archives
Embarking, as befits her academic background, on an extensive and multilingual deep dive, Pascal visited the Departmental Archives in Pau, where she “found letters about Eva Daube,” giving her, in her words, “the political story, the banality of evil that lay behind the French Socialist government’s arrest of those stripped of their identity.” Pascal also drew on the Wiener Holocaust Library’s holdings, interviews with Eva Daube’s descendants, and a trip to Heidelberg “to see the landscape [Arendt] saw,” which she says “helped me with visuals.” This informs and interacts with Arendt’s later work on the psychology of those responsible for the Holocaust: “She talks about this in her 1964 German TV interview with Günter Gaus and it is clear that she is talking of how easy it is to carry out mass murder. The normality of antisemitism in Europe was unremarkable/banal.”
On form, Pascal rejected naturalism outright: “This could not be a naturalistic play. The fractured lives of the protagonists need the stage language of Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Steven Berkoff, Tadeusz Kantor, Joan Littlewood and Pina Bausch.”
Theatricalising real people raised obvious challenges, which Pascal addresses directly: “I tell myself that this is not a documentary… My job is to find the essence of a person and explore it through my imagination.” She points to recording her uncle Albert Daube, Eva’s brother, late in his life – “the German in his voice showed me how to infuse another culture into spoken English” – just one way she found an authentic articulation without claiming documentary accuracy.
Staging brought its own compromises. The script “has a screenplay quality which requires a large cast,” but had to work in a studio theatre – “six represent thousands.” Directing her own writing meant cutting cinematic images she loved, such as a detained bride’s white wedding dress slowly bedraggled to mark the passing of time and freedom: “When I started to mark up the script as a director, I sometimes had to kick the writer out of the room… Less is more is a phrase that came to mind.”
Silence
Getting the play staged proved difficult in the current climate. Written in 2017, it wasn’t sent to venues until after October 2023, and Pascal describes “a boycott by silence” from some theatres, and a venue that told her they were booked “for the foreseeable future.” It found a home instead at our beloved Arcola, where, she says, “we have history and we support each other.”
Pascal defends Arendt’s own phrase (the banality of evil) against critics who called it trivialising: “I understand the phrase as her analysis of how commonplace and evil antisemitism is.” She sees the play as urgently contemporary rather than historical, arguing it speaks to a moment when “Jews are wrongly seen as brutal, white colonialists in a binary political analysis which is overpowering among the Left” – and calls staging it now, amid “a mood of cancel culture,” an “act of defiance.” Explaining the satirical nature of the piece, she closes the interview by saying: “all I need to do is to plug into my working class Blackpool self, and my Jewish East European heritage, and the scenes write themselves.” Well, we certainly will be in the front row on 8 October and hope you’ll join us.
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940
8 October - 7 November 2026
Arcola Theatre
