Stage
Breaking the silence
Theatre must do better by the Jewish community
by KATE MALTBY
© LIAM WHITE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
On 1st March, the Royal Court Theatre made an extraordinary admission. In an internal report into its own mistakes, the theatre’s board recognised that “people working in theatre often feel uncomfortable in disclosing that they are Jewish.” They’re not wrong. As one young Jewish theatre-maker told me recently: “I sometimes feel Jewish people in theatre need our own #MeToo movement—not to compare our experience to the crimes addressed by that movement, but as a model for finally breaking silence.”
Why had the Royal Court broken its own silence, and pledged that Jewish people should indeed be comfortable at the theatre? In November, news emerged that Rare Earth Mettle, the theatre’s latest play by the writer Al Smith, would feature an avaricious billionaire with the name Hershel Fink—about as Jewish a name as you can get. It didn’t help that the plot’s denouement saw him bribing a professor to rewrite tribal history, so that a man working for him could stake an indigenous claim to mineral-rich land.