Playwright Steven Berkoff to Haaretz: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic poison in guise
Steven Berkoff needs no help when it comes to making hard-hitting, uncomfortable theater. Nevertheless, a trio of news items has lent disturbing topicality to the world premiere of his latest work in London.
Written and codirected by Berkoff, “Religion and Anarchy” is comprised of five one-act plays and deals with anti-Semitism, both old and supposedly new. It opens with a Cockney couple bickering over “the Yids” and their treatment of “those poor little Arab kids,” and culminates all too logically in a 10-minute depiction of three men’s final moments in a gas chamber.
Shortly after the production opened late last month in the West End’s tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, the language that defines the evening's first play, “How to Train an Anti-Semite,” was splashed across the papers as part of a story about how Britain’s Football Association aims to prevent Tottenham Hotspur fans from calling themselves the “Yid Army.”
Around about the same time, tabloid daily The Daily Mail sparked controversy with a piece on Labour leader Ed Miliband’s late father, Ralph. “The Man Who Hated Britain” is how the newspaper characterized the Jewish, Marxist academic. It was, tweeted John Mann - chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism - a “classical age-old anti-Semitic smear about disloyal Jews.”
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/.premium-1.554267
