Churchill on Gaza

A passage from David Lane's Contemporary British Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2010), describing a recent short play by British dramatist Caryl Churchill:

Her final salvo of the decade was the provocatively one-sided ten-minute play Seven Jewish Children: a play for Gaza (2009), a response to Israel's retaliation against intensive bombing from the Islamist terror organization Hamas after Christmas 2008. An unspecified number of Jewish adults (nine in the Royal Court production) gather in seven tightly written scenes to debate what they should tell a young girl about Israel's history. Each scene is located during a significant historical moment, stretching from pre-Holocaust Germany, through to the Six-Day War in 1967 and finally Gaza in 2009. Charting the rise of a nation from the persecuted to the aggressor, the dialogue is comprised as a list of statements rife with internal conflict over honesty versus the need to protect:

Tell her it's a game
Tell her it's serious
But don't frighten her
Don't tell her they'll kill her
Tell her it's important to be quiet
Tell her she'll have cake if she's good
Tell her to curl up as if she's in bed
But not to sing. (49)

Each section continues with the same pattern of conflict until the last, when there is a barrage of statements celebrating Israel's right to be among other things 'better haters' and 'chosen people', though still culminating with the contradictory line 'Don't tell her that.' The play uses a concise and intelligent structure to externalise the troubled internal dialogue of a Jewish nation. It dramatises the awkward task of bequeathing a nation's history to its children, but reconciling it with a desire to protect them from lies and fear.

The play attracted accusations of anti-Semitism from the Jewish press, one national broadsheet and two evening tabloids for its 'ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness' (50). Churchill and director Dominic Cooke had written and directed a play 'critical of, and entirely populated by, characters from one community' and it was therefore indefensible regardless of its dramatic power, as neither of them were Jewish (51). What this criticism overlooks is the play's core structural dynamic: indecision. If a nation's historical identity is constructed upon reportage of past events, the perspective from which they are reported is crucial. This is the struggle the characters face. They are simultaneously heroes and villains. Their pride is at stake but they are aware of their own fallibility and therefore show a confused humility, rather than Machiavellian cunning. They are struggling to create a fixed version of history when history is perpetually fluid, terminally insecure and one sided. Churchill's portrayal of the Jewish people may have been critical, but it therefore comes with an understanding that they are only exercising part of an eternal and global human conundrum: 'we're just like everybody else and we're nothing like anybody else' (52). As a writer with an acute sense of what is means to suffer from the human condition, it is a fitting description for her most recent work.

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(49) Caryl Churchill, Seven Jewish Children (London: Nick hern Books, 2009), p. 1.
(50) Christopher Hart, Review of Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, The Sunday Times, 15 February 2009.
(51) John Nathan, Review of Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, Jewish Chronicle, 12 February 2009.
(52) Dominic Maxwell, Review of Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, The Times, 13 February 2009.

Caryl Churchill (Wikipedia)

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