Julia Pascal Thesis 26 Sept.Pdf
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The Absence of Female Jewish Characters on the Post-war English Stage: Thesis and Three Plays Julia Pascal PhD University of York Theatre, Film and Television February 2016 Abstract This thesis examines representations of Jewish women on the British stage from 1945 to the present. I interrogate the lack of varied and realistic Jewish women characters in the canon and discuss this in relationship to my own published and performed plays. The absence of Jewish women in British modern theatre is explored historically and as a phenomenon influenced by both Christian and Jewish traditions. My research probes how stereotypes from Christian medieval tropes have been transformed and re- awoken, particularly since the 1980s, and how this has impacted the representation of Jewish women. I highlight the importance of Yiddish theatre as a dynamic space where Jewish women’s representation broke the rule of exclusion from public performance and offered a variety of complicated and complex roles on the international stage. The thesis examines the post-war loss of Yiddish theatre and the Yiddish language, and the subsequent effect on the development of Jewish female dramatic characterisation onstage. I reveal the vacuum left with the death of Yiddish, and how with the destruction of the language and culture, the representation of a variety of Jewish women’s roles, created by the Yiddishists, was forgotten and lost to subsequent generations. Post-war playwrights are discussed to explore modern female Jewish characters that have been produced for the English stage. The creation of Anne Frank, as a dramatic figure, is examined to understand how the adaptation of her diary impacts on the representation of Jewish women. My contribution as a practitioner is revealed within the larger framework of the British cultural and political environments. I examine why there is this absence of Jewish female characters in British modern drama and reveal my own attempts to challenge this and to open up the experience of being a Jewish woman in its many facets and theatrical manifestations. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 List of Accompanying Material 4 Acknowledgments 5 Author’s Declaration 6 Part One: Thesis 7 Chapter One: A Personal Hinterland 8 Resonances from pogrom to Shoah and beyond 8 Feminism and Contemporary European and American Voices 16 British Voices 19 Multicultural Voices 20 A European Jewish Background 22 Influences On My Writing 24 Irish and Jewish Nationalism 26 Antisemitism and its effect on British writers 30 Chapter Two: Mapping the Territory 33 Jews Represented Historically In Theatre 33 Yiddish Theatre 35 Chapter Three: Jewish Female Characters On The British Stage 43 Presence and Absence 43 Jim Allen, Peter Flannery and Caryl Churchill 44 Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Steven Berkoff, David Hare Nicholas Wright, Cecil Taylor and Bernard Kops 49 Tacit Censorship 60 Michelene Wandor, Deborah Levy and Diane Samuels 62 Anne Frank 65 Chapter Four: Jewish Women’s Representation Onstage-Julia Pascal 72 Woman On The Bridge 72 12-37 92 Next Stop Paradise 98 Part Two: The Plays 111 PLAY ONE: WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE 112 PLAY TWO: 12-37 178 PLAY THREE NEXT STOP PARADISE 257 BIBLIOGRAPHY 319 3 List of Accompanying Material 1 Professional Portfolio 4 Acknowledgments At the University of York, I acknowledge first and foremost my supervisor, Professor Mary Luckhurst, for her inspiration and encouragement as well as her mentorship and support. I also wish to express my appreciation to the tireless Dr Lisa Peschel, who generously became my co- supervisor when Professor Luckhurst moved to the University of Melbourne. I am also most appreciative of the help given by Dr Kristyn Gorton. Many colleagues offered me important advice during this study. Among them I wish to thank Dr Geraldine Cohen, Professor Yulia Kovas, Dr Charles Landau, Dr Joanna Newman, Dr Andrea Noureyeh, Dr Emma Sweeney, Professor Ginette Vincendeau and Dr Mahnaz Yousefzadeh. I wish to also thank Ruth Posner as my muse for so many of my leading roles, and former NYPD police officer Irma Rivera Duffy, who allowed me to use much of her own experience as background for the role of Gloria in Woman On The Bridge. There were many others who were also generous to me over the years of study: the League of Professional Theatre Women in New York was especially helpful when Woman On The Bridge had public readings at Julia’s Room and with the support of Michael Price at the Theatre For The New City. Thank you also to Katharina Hubschmann and The Wiener Library. Dramaturgical input was kindly given by Dr Andrea Nouryeh and Zachary Marlin. Thank you to New York University and St Lawrence University, where I teach Writing on the London Study Abroad Programs. Both universities were solid in their backing of my study. Thank you also to Dr Thomas Kampe who inspired me to undertake this study. I dedicate this doctorate to the memory of my aunt, Edith Newman, and to my grandmother, Esther Jacobs. It was she who taught me that education is never too heavy to carry around. 5 Author’s Declaration I confirm that all the work submitted in this thesis is my own and that it has not been submitted for examination at this, or any other institution, for any other awards. All sources are acknowledged as references. 6 Part One: Thesis 7 Chapter One: A Personal Hinterland Resonances from pogrom to Shoah and beyond My thesis explores the presence and absence of Jewish women characters on the English stage from 1945 to the present day. It reflects on the characters in my thesis plays of Judith, Anna and Louise in Woman On The Bridge, Rina in 12-37 and Joan and Sarah in Next Stop Paradise. To examine this presence and absence, I shall be referring to the canon of twentieth-century post- war English drama, and my own work within it as a female British Jewish playwright. My identity, is what Freud called ‘a godless Jew’.1 I was born in England and yet being inflected by a profound sense of being more European than English, gives my work a particularity and moves it from the mainstream. The majority of my texts nearly always have a historical, rather than a contemporary impulse, and that history is often inspired by war, exile and trauma. I am in the conflicted position of being, in some respects, considered both as established and, at the same time, marginal. Research leads me to realise that this is because my themes, mainly the exploration of Jewish history and Jewish women, appear to be peripheral to the zeitgeist and therefore to current repertoires. I have read the body of women playwrights producing dramas from the post-war period, as well as having explored the work of younger dramatists producing dramas from 2012 to the present and find, that, apart from gender, we British women playwrights, have little in common. This is because my texts have been fuelled by a European, feminist, Jewish experience and, after much research, I believe that I am the sole UK author representing this particular combination of perspectives. Most of my work is located in the dramatic representation of post-Shoah experience, through women’s eyes. If this locus hardly exists in contemporary British theatre, its dynamism is present in the work of continental European and American feminist Holocaust scholars and dramatists. Here I find synergy. For the purpose of this thesis, my definition of ‘contemporary’ covers the wide span of 1945–2016, but will also include dramas produced in the thesis period 2012–2016. As this paper focuses on the absence and presence of Jewish women characters in the post-war period, and is framed also by feminist historians and critics, the elasticity of this time-frame is vital. I believe that this is the most fruitful way to chart cultural movements, especially as critical examination of women’s experience in the Shoah did not start until the 1990s; for this reason the paper is looking at a wave that defies being constrained into the thesis period of 2012–2016. 1See http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2008/11/freud-e.htm accessed 17 July 2016. See Peter Gay’s A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 8 It is also important to contextualise my dramas within the new body of critical writing, which I shall discuss in this paper, and which is still emerging from the children of those whose families died in the Holocaust. The academics that I shall investigate share generational, thematic and intellectual connections with creative artists. I believe that our work, although operating in separate fields, can provide a fruitful exchange. Most of us were born between 1945 and 1955 and, as the daughters of the Shoah experience, our shared concerns are with memory, exile, war, trauma and women’s narratives. Our sources are similarly inspired by fragmented family histories, but our development of this material is mostly filtered through different genres.2 I situate myself in this body of writers, described by the writer Eva Hoffman, in an interview with The New York Times, as ‘the hinge generation’.3 She refers to those of us whose parents were survivors of the Shoah as the transmitters of that shadow. I feel part of the sisterhood that is Dworkin, Fresco, Hirsch and Hoffman. My kinship with stage writers is with contemporary Black British women playwrights who share similar explorations of double heritage, double language and a sense of exile from the mainstream. Later in this thesis, in order to offer context, I shall describe particular aspects of my own family history.