| Valuable Opportunity for West Wales Audience |
At Louche Theatre |
| Louche Theatre/ Aberystwyth Arts Centre- Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , November 13, 2009 |
To write about “Seven Jewish Children” is not to write about a piece of theatre. At least it is to write about not just a piece of theatre. Caryl Churchill’s honed, elliptical playlet is a public event, the object of bitter comment and a high measure of vituperation. To deal with the theatre; the performance was presented with no credits, no programme but Harry Durnall was at its directorial helm. He had selected to augment the text with music by Cor Gobaith. Utilising the Aberystwyth main stage to its full the choir moved, twenty-one strong, across the stage to visit each of the seven groupings of two or three mainly women. Before, between and after Ms Churchill’s clusters of lines they sang beautifully, with Ailsa Mair Hughes’ luminous soprano to the fore. The forty plus performers were all clothed in black; the lighting of the backdrop moved from deep red to blue. The effect was of sober stagecraft, embued with dignity and a deep moral seriousness. The assaults on Ms Churchill have taken several distinct paths. The first is that it is partisan, grotesquely so. But no work comes without possessing some kind of viewpoint. David Greig’s “Damascus”, currently on a world tour with the wholehearted blessing of the British Council, expresses a broad sympathy with the dispossessed. The last voice to be heard in “Seven Jewish Children” is that of a murderous, blanket indifference. That such a voice exists is probable. Remembering the defence that Anthony Burgess put up against the tabloid assault on “Clockwork Orange,” there is all the difference between an artist representing a truth from the world and the artist endorsing it. The fallacy in the interpretation that has occurred is the certainty that Ms Churchill’s intention is to represent a national posture through a single voice. At this point the critical voice, purportedly dispassionate, stumbles. Where the Middle East is concerned it is a rare individual who can escape the thickets of personal perception. It is not just that Aberystwyth has been one of the few venues in Britain to present drama by Inad Theatre from Beit Jala and the accompanying talk about just what it takes to make theatre in Bethlehem. At an age when impressions are forming for a lifetime I was in a UNWRA refugee camp and met with Fatah commanders. Conversely, I have also seen the furthest point reached by the Syrian army, just a few miles from Tiberias, had sight of Quneitra and perceived the then sense of geographical vulnerability. Politically this was another age- no Oslo, no wall and Sharansky, then a dissident in a Siberian labour camp, was a subject of letters of protest to newspapers. But “Seven Jewish Children” cannot be seen other than through the filters of experience. In that light the words given by Ms Churchill to her characters do not appear to represent a generality. The playlet has also been accused of a general anti-Semitism. The most potent response is to be found in a detailed rebuttal by Antony Lerman in the Guardian’s Comment is Free of 4th May. In the original critique the authors discern elements in the text that were invisible to me. The less aired criticism of the text is the aesthetic. It might have had aspirations to the kind of status that Pinter attained with his ten minute “New World Order.” That work succeeds because its subject is restricted and its artistic treatment one of honed distillation. Ms Churchill’s subject matter is big and faces a complex, multi-hued, paradoxical politics. As just one example the J Street conference of two weeks ago is a massive shift in the politics of influence. Unlike the David Greig play which holds its own against the stream of events this piece does feel subordinate to them. “Seven Jewish Children” was performed in Chapter, the Dylan Thomas Centre and elsewhere last year. It went unreviewed on this site and not uncharacteristically there is no record on the Western Mail site of the tour ever having occurred; all appreciation then to Louche and the Arts Centre for making it available to a Ceredigion audience. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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