Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily.

Theatre coverage beyond the arts pages: anti-semitism on stage

From the time I started reading newspapers regularly, around the age of 14 (long before the days of the internet), I have always turned to the arts pages first — after first sending the sports pages to the dustbin unopened (or later, the recycling one).

The online world allows you to skip the content you don’t want entirely, and head directly to the discretely marked theatre sections (it’s a slight peculiarity that VARIETY, one of the great brand names in arts journalism, doesn’t have a button on its homepage to find its “legit’ coverage — as it calls theatre — but you have to find it by digging deep into “more coverage” to find one there that takes you here: https://variety.com/v/theater/)

But not all theatre coverage is in the arts pages. In yesterday’s Observer, for instance, a thoughtful piece on THE LEHMAN TRILOGY was instead on the comment pages, While Dave Rich calls it “an enthralling piece of theatre”, he also states, ” Unfortunately, it is also profoundly antisemitic. Not in a crude way – a clumsy turn of phrase here, a jarring stereotype there – but in its innermost essence, connecting a modern audience to malevolent beliefs about Jews and money that are buried deep within western thought…. It’s Jews, money and power, over and over again.” This is, he concludes, deeply antisemitic: “Not because it tells you that the Lehmans were Jewish, but in reviving this old belief that a form of banking that rewards greed and exploitation is Jewish in both origin and character, and that the way Jews relate to money shapes our world.”

As Vicky Featherstone found out at the Royal Court, there’s a lot of unconscious anti-semitism about, so much that no one even noticed when a leading character in the play Rare Earth Mettle was given an explicitly Jewish name, Herschel Fink, until the play was about to open.

The Court responded by commissioning a report that saw Board chair Anthony Burton issue this statement: “The Royal Court Theatre apologises unreservedly for the pain that has been caused around the production of its play Rare Earth Mettle. This incident fell short of the Royal Court’s own high ambitions in terms of inclusivity and anti-racism. It is committed to learning from it and clear actions have been put in place including specialist training on antisemitism. The Royal Court must and will become a space in which Jewish artists and other professionals can work without fear of antisemitism, as it always should have been.”

Tomorrow sees performances beginning for a new production of The Merchant of Venice at Watford Palace (prior to a national tour, and including a run at Stratford-upon-Avon), starring Jewish actor and activist Tracy-Ann Oberman as Shylock in an adaptation (also by Oberman) that relocates the action to the East End of London of the 1930s, against the backdrop of the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In an interview in The Guardian, Oberman  says: “You cannot help but look at when the play was written – a time of huge antisemitism in this country. That was Shakespeare’s world. Is it an antisemitic play? I think its legacy is antisemitic. So yes, I suppose it is an antisemitic play.”

Online vs print reviews

While the bottomless pit of the internet allows publications to publish more content than they ever used to, when space was limited by the number of pages they had each day (which itself was typically dependent on the amount of advertising secured around the editorial content), one issue nowadays is that readers of the PAID print edition don’t get as much content as those who take it for free online.

In the letters page in Saturday’s Guardian, a reader — John Boundy, former head of radio arts for the BBC — pointed out, “Opera audiences are only just beginning to return in the numbers seen before the pandemic. They can do with all the help they can get. Strange, therefore, that while the Guardian has published many opera reviews online in the past six months, only three of them have appeared in the print edition – and none in the past three months.”

Obviously a case could be made for the fact that opera is a minority interest, and they are only putting in print things that are of wider appeal and reach. But one of the reasons I still value print (over online) is the chance encounter is much more likely: you stumble upon things to read in print that you might not otherwise see. An opera review might be one of them.

Reviews deepen appreciation of things I’ve already seen; but they also often point me to things I’d not necessarily think of seeing otherwise.

Confronting the past 

Life is a constant journey forward — but sometimes you have to make peace with the past in order to travel forwards. I’ve written here before of my own journey in the last three years towards making peace with my past, particularly in relation to my rejecting father; and in a podcast interview with VARIETY, actor Anthony Rapp spoke of how he has done so, too.

He had brought a civil suit against Kevin Spacey for an alleged sexual assault when he was just a teenager. As Gordon Cox writes, “Spacey was found not guilty, but on the latest episode of Stagecraft, Variety‘s theater podcast, Rapp said it was all worth it — not least because it’s been one step in a long process of healing. ‘On balance? It’s worth it in the sense that my coming forward helped pave the way for others to come forward, and has helped protect people,’ he said. ‘And there’s a part of my 14-year-old self that got to come full-circle in a way that I didn’t know was possible’.”

I felt the same way when I brought a case for unfair dismissal against the Sunday Express when they fired me as their long-standing theatre critic in 2013, when a former partner tipped them off about the existence of naked pictures of me online. I, too, lost my case — I was not an employee of the paper, but a freelance contributor — and unfair dismissal cases can only succeed if I was an employee, though my barrister sought to show that I was treated like I was one.

But like Rapp, I felt vindicated by the case — I was able to hold the paper to account for what they put me through (while exposing the utter hypocrisy of its then-proprietor Richard Desmond, a billionaire who made his fortune through porn outlets!). And instead of reacting with shame, as they expected me to, I owned the existence of those pictures, and proved that the shame was entirely theirs for firing me over something entirely unrelated to my ability to do the job I’d done for them so diligently for more than a decade.

SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY

My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-february-27/

This week sees the West End opening of two high-profile shows: the transfer of the Young Vic’s OKLAHOMA! to an (entirely reconfigured) Wyndham’s, pictured above, opening on Tuesday; and Sheridan Smith as SHIRLEY VALENTINE at the Duke of York’s, opening on Wednesday. Critics were invited to a range of designated previews ahead of opening night for both, so expect the reviews to appear en masse when the embargoes are lifted on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings respectively.  (My own review for OKLAHOMA! will run on Plays International; while i will cover SHIRLEY VALENTINE in my next newsletter here on Thursday).

See you here on Thursday

I will be back on Thursday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)