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Perdition by Jim Allen
premiered at the Gate Theatre, London
By Paul Bond 13 July
1999
Twelve years after its premiere
was dramatically cancelled, Jim Allen's play Perdition has
finally reached the stage. The Gate Theatre hosted the
production, which opened shortly before Allen's tragic death
from cancer on June 24, 1999. One of the more prestigious
fringe theatres in London, their production is a fitting
tribute to the socialist writer.
The action of Perdition owes
much to the real trial of Dr. Rudolf Kastner in Israel in
1953.*
The play is set in a London
courtroom in 1967, immediately after the "Six Day War". Ruth
Kaplan has written a pamphlet, I Accuse. In it she says, "I
accuse certain Jewish leaders [in Hungary] of
collaborating with the Nazis in 1944." Among them she
includes her former library colleague Dr. Yaron who, she
writes, "bought his own life and the lives of others with
the price of silence". Yaron sues for libel, against which
Kaplan pleads justification. The play records the court
proceedings.
Yaron was a member of the World
Zionist Organisation at the beginning of the war. The play
explores the extent to which Zionism, as a nationalist
political tendency, sought an accommodation with fascism as
a means towards building an Israeli state in Palestine.
Allen wanted to show that, because of its intention to build
a Jewish homeland, Zionism did not oppose the rise of
anti-Semitism. Rather, Zionism saw anti-Semitism as
insurmountable. The only response proposed was emigration to
Palestine.
Allen's horror at the Holocaust
is a key factor in his understanding of the foundation of
the state of Israel. The crucial differentiation in the play
between collaboration and co-operation hinges on whether it
was better to save a handful of "prominents" against the
mass of poor Jews-saving pioneers for the new state, or a
far larger number of assimilated Jews. The defence lawyer,
Scott, quotes David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the state
of Israel, addressing a meeting in December 1938 at which he
said:
"If I knew it was
possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing
them over to England, and only half of them by
transporting them to Israel, then I would opt for the
second alternative. For we must weigh not only the lives
of these children, but also the history of the people of
Israel."
Allen accuses the leaders of
Zionism of keeping silent and of not acting to prevent the
massacre of Hungarian Jews so as to further their political
goal of a Jewish homeland. The trial is not about Kaplan and
her "libel". It is about the origins of a state "coined in
the blood and tears of Hungarian Jewry." As Yaron puts it:
"I am on trial here, not the person who slandered me." By
the end of the play the jury (the audience is openly
addressed as such) have accepted Kaplan's argument and Yaron
himself questions whether his actions were
justified.
The 1987
controversy
Perdition was first offered for
staging to the Royal Court theatre in 1985. Production was
delayed several times, before an opening at the small
experimental venue the Royal Court Upstairs was fixed for
the end of January 1987. The board of the Royal Court,
anxious over any historical controversy, submitted the
script to several academics. Martin Gilbert, biographer of
Winston Churchill, and David Ceserani led the charge of
academics supportive of Zionism, eager to denounce the play
as historically inaccurate.
For daring to attack Zionism,
Allen was labelled as "anti-Semitic". The dispute became
increasingly bitter and ever more nakedly about censorship.
Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court,
withdrew his original support for the play in the face of
the attacks by Ceserani and Gilbert. Noted film director
Ken
Loach, director of
the play and a long-time collaborator with Allen, asked in a
letter to the Guardian newspaper why Stafford-Clark "speaks
only to Zionist historians and activists about a play to
which they were politically hostile? There are many,
academics and others, who support the play." Under threat of
hostile influences on the Royal Court's funding bodies,
Stafford-Clark withdrew the play 48 hours before its first
performance. In spite of support from such figures as Erich
Fried, Noam Chomsky and Maxime Rodinson, Allen was vilified
and the play languished.
The
revival
What strikes the viewer finally
able to see Perdition, after all the attacks and slanders,
is its burning humanity, the belief in a better world,
something that marked all of Allen's work. Scott, in his
impassioned and moving summation, asks: "If anti-Semitism is
indeed 'the Socialism of fools', should we not ask where and
how that consciousness arose in the first place? What is it
in our society that generates this evil?"
In 1987, Ken Loach pleaded for
a chance for his cast to be allowed to stage a reading of
the play in order to disprove the allegations of
anti-Semitism. In performance, Loach's assertion is
triumphantly vindicated. Allen's text, aided by the clarity
of Elliott Levey's direction, is quite explicit on the
difference between Zionism and Judaism, anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism. The text bristles with the agonies of the
Holocaust, agonies which some of the play's wilder critics
in 1987 would have had one believe Allen was
denying.
The play proceeds through
examination and cross-examination. Allen does not overdo the
points he wishes to make and thereby reduce his characters
to stereotypes. When Orzech (Alfred Hofman), the former
Polish Communist Party militant, describes being handed over
to the Gestapo after his release from a Stalinist jail, the
political lessons are only inferred. On the one occasion
when they are spelled out explicitly ("I managed to escape
and return to Warsaw" "'Where you joined the Resistance?"
"Yes, but first I resigned from the Communist Party"), the
exchange provides the one moment of humour in the
play.
A former Labour MP Karpin
(Peter Birrel), also an active Zionist before the war,
testifies in Allen's piece. Again the playwright does not
simplistically spell out the connection between the
nationalism of social democracy and the nationalism of
Zionism.
It was raised against him in
1987 that Allen "overestimated the intelligence of his
audience". That belief in his audience, both as rational,
intellectual beings and as the fabric of the political
future, is what makes Allen so compelling as a playwright.
He does not talk down, nor does he shy away from difficult
concepts or facts. Karpin is a world away from the current
Labour Party type, yet Allen gives us the material necessary
to assemble a view of Labour's politics for ourselves.
The performances of the
witnesses are uniformly good. Joyce Springer's Miriam Moser
looks almost comically dressed up for a big day out, until
she starts talking about the operations performed on her in
Auschwitz. She captures perfectly the mixture of shame and
defiance, the look of someone who has been waiting for the
right person to tell these things to.
The main bulk of the play,
however, falls onto the legal characters. Rebecca Gethings
was an admirably unfussy junior defence counsel, Antonia
Green, providing the perfect foil to Ian Flintoff's defence
lawyer Scott. Flintoff is the only member of the cast to
have been part of the Royal Court company as well. He
barnstormed and grandstanded, but this was present in the
text. Allen made Scott the horrified conscience of the play,
as well as its probing, analytical tool. Ultimately, the
case is decided by a fact which comes unexpectedly out of
the examination of Miriam Moser, but Scott is the one who is
appalled enough to be struck by it, and then cool and
detached enough to pursue it.
In 1987, Flintoff was to have
played Lawson, the plaintiff Dr. Yaron's lawyer, and I felt
the lack of a similar presence in the performance of Penny
Bunton. Bunton was good on her feet, questioning and
attacking witnesses, but during cross-examinations she sat
with a twitchy lack of composure that seemed to start too
soon in the proceedings and run too wildly out of control.
It was the one time I felt that Levey had tilted the odds in
favour of the defendant Kaplan's charges against Zionism
prematurely and counter to Allen's script.
Undoubtedly the stars of the
piece, on whom the greatest emotional burden fell, were
Morris Perry as Yaron and Osnat Schmool as Kaplan. Perry
took us along a journey of self-revelation, from the
self-assured successful figure who had sued for libel,
through the confusion of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, to
being confronted and made aware of what he had done. Perry
showed us brilliantly a man reduced to only his humanity,
stripped of position and dignity, but determined, from his
mistakes, that others should be made aware of the horror and
learn from them.
He is shown the way by
Schmool's magnificent Kaplan. Here is a perfectly ordinary
woman, stumbling over ideas, embarrassed at the conclusions
she has reached, put in an awkward situation. She has
reached these conclusions from her own researches: at no
point during the war did the Zionist leadership call on Jews
in Europe to resist. For Kaplan this is the lesson that must
be learned. Zionism offered a national homeland, but the
right of Jews to live wherever they wish must be defended.
Harried and ridiculed, she triumphs through her dignity and
her stubbornness. It was a fine performance
indeed.
The play is a powerful one,
even if somewhat wordy and static. In a small theatre and
with a good cast, as here, it is compelling and involving.
Perhaps the final words should be Allen's, from Scott's
summation:
"If our remorse for
what happened to the Jews is to have any meaning, must we
not tear out the roots of this evil and eradicate it
completely so as to ensure that never again will a people
be exterminated simply because they exist? If another
major economic crisis occurs at some time in the future,
can we with confidence assert that fascism will not arise
again like a broken sewerage pipe disgorging its filth
and corruption on society? Have we been given not a
victory over Fascism, but a reprieve, a warning, a
breathing space?"
It is a source of some
satisfaction that Jim Allen lived long enough to see this,
his contribution to that process, so well effected at last.
* In 1944 Nazi-occupied
Hungary, Kastner was a Labour Zionist leader and Jewish
Agency official. He made an agreement with Adolf Eichmann-in
return for keeping quiet about Auschwitz, a few of his
relatives, friends and Labour Zionist associates would be
released. After the war, journalist Malchiel Greenwald
published an account of Kastner's squalid actions. Whereupon
the Israeli Attorney General sued Greenwald for libel
(Kastner was by now a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade
and Industry). Although the court found in Greenwald's
favour, this decision was reversed on appeal. By a majority
verdict, the Israeli Supreme Court found that Kastner's
actions were morally justifiable and convicted Greenwald of
criminal libel for calling Kastner's actions
"collaboration".
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