East End Review

Tag: Park Theatre

  • Crossing Jerusalem: stage review – ‘We’re all the same stinking family!’

    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre
    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre. Photograph: Habie Schwarz

    “We’re all the same stinking family!” exclaims Sergei, attempting to diffuse an argument between an Arab and a Jew at a birthday party. In Julia Pascal’s 2002 play Crossing Jerusalem everybody is connected. Arabs, Jews and Christians hailing from countless corners of the world live cheek by jowl in one of the oldest cities in the world.

    Playing at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until the end of August, Crossing Jerusalem is set in the Israeli capital during the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, when buses and cafés were the frequent target of bombings. So the Kaufmann family is justifiably on edge.

    Head of the household is Varda, a headstrong, workaholic, Jewish mother, who deals in real estate. Trudy Weiss as the matriarch is almost manic with paranoia, absently flitting from thought to thought, briefly breaking her stream of consciousness to criticise her daughter’s dress sense and her own lack of a grandchild.

    Only when she is crossed do we feel the full intensity of her feeling. “This is our country. If it goes to hell then we’ll go with it,” she declares. All of the characters at some point make reference to how dire the situation is.

    Everybody seems to have a claim to the disputed territory, and nobody a solution. So trauma is passed down through the generations with no suggestion of peace in sight. The state of Israel being as young as it is, the provenance of the homes Varda sells is inevitably called into question. An Arab family lived in their home before them – a neat metaphor for the wider political context.

    The design by Claire Lyth and Ben Cowens is simple and effective, summoning the remorseless heat and intense sunlight on blinding, white stone. The play takes place over the course of 24 hours, highlighting a sense of the ephemeral. The citizens of Jerusalem are forced to live in the moment because tomorrow may never come.

    Although Pascal says she had to omit some of the ‘Jewish-isms’ in the play for fear they would not be understood, there is still much laughter of recognition in the audience and a handful of great punchlines too. In an inversion of the famous quote, Varda remarks that Israel’s problem is that it suffers from: “Too much history. Not enough geography”.

    There is strong support from the younger members of the cast too. Adi Lerer is full-blooded and live throughout, and Alistair Toovey is particularly impressive as the vengeful and naïve Sharif. Varda’s husband Sergei battles persistently to diffuse the tensions rife within his family. And if his jollity and bad jokes grate to begin with, they find their mark eventually, with Chris Spyrides showing us the tenderness behind the character’s apparently offhand remarks.

    Crossing Jerusalem is at the Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP until 29 August

  • Crossing Jerusalem – a conflict of interest

    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre
    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre

    Jerusalem is a city on the edge. One of the oldest urban civilisations in the world, and a holy site for three major religions, it has in recent times become characterised by conflict.

    Control of the city is one of the central issues in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains not just a dispute over territory, but one of identity.

    Set against this backdrop is Julia Pascal’s 2003 play, Crossing Jerusalem, which is being remounted this month at the Park Theatre.

    Directed by the writer herself, the play takes place over a 24-hour period, capitalising on the ephemeral atmosphere in the city.

    “There is a sort of low-level anxiety in Israel constantly,” she says. “Love, sex and death are raw and present there all the time.”

    Pascal is an atheist, attending a non-religious state school in Manchester and ‘marrying out’ of Jewish society. But she still considers herself Jewish in a cultural sense.

    She wrote the Crossing Jerusalem following the Second Intifada, the Palestinian revolt against Israel that lasted from 2000 to 2005.

    Her research saw Pascal masking her Jewish identity and venturing into the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, speaking French as a decoy to find out the truth of what life was like there.

    “Being a writer is like being a spy,” says Pascal. “As a ‘French person’ I was told things I never would have heard a as Jew.”

    This is where she discovered details of the relationships depicted in the piece.

    These include a Jewish woman’s love for her Arab servant, acts of horrific violence perpetrated by both sides, and unusual culture clashes such as the Christian Arab who will host anyone at his restaurant as long as they can afford to eat.

    It is these apparent inconsistencies and contradictions that Pascal always seeks to draw attention to in her writing. She tells me that the only Jewish plays in London are anti-Zionist and that the nature of the conflict in the Middle East is over-simplified, supporting an “easy political dogma”.

    Her considerable body of work declares a fearless appetite to challenge these received opinions and an eagerness to expose the complex and uncomfortable truth.

    And this play is no different. It is an insight into a strained and complex world of family ties, prejudice, religious obligation and above all humanity.

    As Pascal says: “The more we know about each other, the safer the world is.”

    Crossing Jerusalem
    4–29 August
    Park Theatre
    Clifton Terrace
    N4 3JP
    parktheatre.co.uk

  • Play about Jimmy Savile is an ‘incredibly important story’

    Alastair McGowan as Jimmy Savile. Photograph: Helen Maybanks
    Alastair McGowan as Jimmy Savile. Photograph: Helen Maybanks

    No subject, it seems, is too raw for Jonathan Maitland. After using drag to depict Margaret Thatcher in his debut play Dead Sheep this year, the journalist turned playwright is now tackling the most notorious sex abuser of recent history: Jimmy Savile. An Audience with Jimmy Savile is based on real events, uses almost verbatim dialogue, and stars the renowned impersonator and actor Alastair McGowan. While the play might sound more frightening than entertaining, Maitland insists it is an important story that needs to be heard.

    Why did you set out to write play about Jimmy Savile?
    I’ve been a journalist for 30 years and I think it’s an incredibly important story because of how it impacts on the way we deal with allegations of abuse, our cravenness before celebrity and the libel laws. My first instinct was to cover it journalistically on TV, but after Dead Sheep I realised you can tell a story more effectively and get to a greater truth (that’s a bit of a cliché but it’s true) by doing a dramatised form of journalism. It was a revelation to me that you can get to truth more effectively by using a little bit of drama.

    What is the play’s narrative focus?
    There are two bits to the narrative: a TV show with a This is Your Life-style audience, where the great and the good and famous line up to praise Savile, and he acts the fool and the clown; and the other, more important narrative is following the struggle of someone he’s abused to be believed, to be listened to and to find justice. It’s based on real life as there was a woman who tried to confront him, and this takes it to that next logical step which shows her getting an audience with him and confronting him. The play’s two key themes are: how did he get away with it, and how do you come back from the abuse and not being believed, which was for some people the worst bit. Ultimately we’re trying to make a play about forgiveness and redemption and hope and renewal, something I hope will come through very strongly by the end.

    What makes theatre the right medium for tackling the subject of Jimmy Savile?
    There wasn’t a camera there when young women or girls were telling their parents what happened in private. You can’t get that across in a TV documentary. At best you might have someone in silhouette talking about it. But in a play you can recreate what happened in private, which is an incredible eyeopener and gobsmacking for the audience. You can also in a play – which we have done – recreate a police interview with Savile, which happened about six years ago in which he runs rings around them. It’s an incredible gift for dramatisation and an incredible public service to bring to life the moment where he got off the hook. I think theatre’s more immediate and more in your face literally. And it can be more powerful.

    How did you write the play?
    It’s not 100 per cent verbatim, but if there’s such a thing as ‘part verbatim’, then it’s that. It’s based on police interview transcripts, public inquiry reports, interviews with abuse victims, YouTube – which is very useful – and books by and about him. It takes quotes from him and it’s based on real events. Some of dialogues have been imagined, though I’m very happy that he either said or could have said everything in the play.

    And part of the research was that you spoke to and consulted with abuse victims?
    Yes, and I’ve met with Peter Saunders, founder of NAPAC [The National Association for People Abused in Childhood]. He’s very supportive and if the show makes a profit a substantial proportion will go to his organisation. He understands what we’re trying to do and he’s called us an important part of the conversation that we need to be having about abuse.

    Is it true that you have received a “tsunami of abuse” about the play?
    It wasn’t a tsunami, it was more of a small trickle. But yes I got a few insults on Twitter and I engaged with them all and explained what I was doing it for, and a lot of critics became supporters once I’d explained it, which was very gratifying.

    What does Alastair McGowan bring to the part of Jimmy Savile?
    He’s very compelling, he’s very unnerving, he’s very skilled at portraying the full gamut of the personality: the entertaining, eccentric side, but also more importantly the horrible, nasty, dark and psychopathic side.

    What do you say to people who think it is ‘too soon’ for a play about Jimmy Savile?
    He died four years ago, and there’s not a flag that goes up to say right it’s now okay to do a play or TV drama about Jimmy Savile. I think you have to take the opinions of those who are most closely affected by it, and that is the victims. And the ones I’ve spoken to don’t think it’s too soon at all. In fact their only issue with timing is that this story and their stories weren’t told sooner. There have been 44 NHS reports, four police reports and God knows how many articles and documentaries, so now seems the right time to try and make sense of it all in one piece of dramatic journalism.

    An Interview with Jimmy Savile is at Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP from 10 June – 11 July.