Perdition (play)

Perdition is a 1987 stage play by Jim Allen. Its premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, in a production directed by Ken Loach, was abandoned because of protests and objections from historians over its controversial and tendentious claims.[1]

Outline

The play deals with a libel action in Israel a few years after the Second World War, which concerned alleged collaboration during the war between the leadership of the Zionist movement in Hungary and the Nazis.

Its starting point comes from the trial of Rudolf Kastner, a leading member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, whose job it was to help Jews escape from Nazi-ruled Hungary. His libel trial in Israel was about an accusation that he had collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, one of the main SS officers in charge of carrying out the Holocaust. Though the initial trial found that he had indeed "sold his soul to the devil" by saving certain Jews whilst failing to warn others that their "resettlement" was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, there was a subsequent trial at the Supreme Court of Israel at which the findings were overturned.

The play asks a question via the device of another (this time, fictional) libel trial in London in 1967 involving a man called Dr. Yaron. The question is whether the saving of certain Jews an act of collaboration in line with Zionist philosophies about populating Israel at the expense of those Jews who remained. The play’s text includes such analogies as “the Zionist knife in the Nazi fist” (which was cut in the pre-production period)[2] and accuses Jewish leaders: “To save your hides, you practically led them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz”.[3] Characters assert that “Israel was founded on the pillars of Western guilt and American dollars” and “Israel was coined in the blood of Hungarian Jewry”.[4]

Allen was influenced by activist Lenni Brenner’s book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983),[5] which he described as "a goldmine source".[6] In an interview with Time Out at the time of the intended original production, Allen described his play as “the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist”.[2][7] According to Allen, during The Holocaust, “the lower you went down on the social scale, the more you found resistance; but the higher you went up the social scale, the more you found cooperation and collaboration [with the Nazis]”.[4] David Cesarani wrote that, like Brenner in his book, Allen drew on anti-Zionist stereotypes which originated in the Soviet Union which have a "Jewish conspiracy theory" at their centre.[6]

Cancellation and controversy

In January 1987, the Ken Loach-directed production of Perdition for London's Royal Court Theatre, intended for its Upstairs studio theatre,[1] was cancelled on the day before the first preview performance. At the time, the historian Martin Gilbert said the play was "a complete travesty of the facts"[4] and "deeply anti-Semitic".[8] Another specialist in the field, David Cesarani, agreed.[9] Max Stafford-Clark, then the artistic director of the Royal Court, rejected assertions the play was antisemitic or contained errors, but said that continuing with the production would cause "great distress to sections of the community".[8] Loach claimed that the Royal Court had given into pressure from members of the British Jewish community, including the publisher Lord Weidenfeld and the political adviser Lord Goodman.[3] Loach told a newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party that he "hadn't tangled with the Zionist lobby before" and "what is amazing is the strength and organisation and power of their lobby." He was also angry with the dramatist Caryl Churchill, who defended Stafford-Clark's decision.[2] Jim Allen himself blamed "the Zionist machine".[4]

In an article for The Jewish Chronicle in 2017, Dave Rich described the play as being a "Stalinist lie." He wrote that Loach is one individual who uses the Perdition episode "to try to claim that the entire Zionist movement collaborated in the murder of their fellow Jews; either from cold, cynical calculation – they only cared about getting Jews to Mandate Palestine – or through ideological affinity".[10] Glenda Abramson wrote in Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (1998) that in his play Allen "uses Zionism rather than Nazism as his exemplar of fascism and the analogy of Israel rather than Nazi Germany in his warning about the future revival of global fascism."[1] In a letter to The Guardian in 2004, in connection with the premature end of another controversial play's production, Loach wrote that "the charge of antisemitism" against Allen's play "is the time-honoured way to deflect anti-Zionist arguments".[11]

Later developments

In 1999, the play was performed at the Gate Theatre, London in a production by Elliot Levey in what David Jay, writing for the New Statesman, described as "a significantly rewritten version".[12] Levey defended the play in 1999: "It is not historically inaccurate. It's very much a pro-Jewish play. My hope is that it won't be sat on, as it was in the 1980s."[13]

Perfidy, by Ben Hecht, is a non-fiction work about the Kastner trial. The title of the play appears to echo Hecht's title.[14]

References
  1. Abramson, Glenda (1998). Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel. Cambridge University Press. pp. 169–70. ISBN 9780521441599.
  2. Rich, Dave (2016). The Left's Jewish Problem. London: Biteback. p. 147. ISBN 9781785901515.
  3. Cohen, Ben (Fall 2004). "The Persistence of Anti-Semitism on the British Left". Jewish Political Studies Review. Retrieved 27 September 2017. (This text is also online under the title: "A Discourse of Delegitimisation: The British Left and the Jews".)
  4. Joffee, Linda (23 February 1987). "A play no theater will play". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  5. Hirsh, David (2017). Contemporary Left Antisemitism. London: Routledge. p. 40. ISBN 9781315304298.
  6. Cesarani, David (1990). "The Perdition Affair". In Wistrich, Robert S. (ed.). Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World. Basingstoke & London: Macmillan. p. 54–55.
  7. Aaronovitch, David (12 April 2017). "Don't let the revisionists rewrite Nazi history". The Times. Retrieved 27 September 2017. (subscription required)
  8. "London Theater Drops Disputed Play". The New York Times. Reuters. 22 January 1987. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  9. Lion, Ed (22 January 1987). "Jewish group hails play cancellation". United Press International. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  10. Rich, Dave (27 September 2017). "Loach, Livingstone and the Holocaust: a study in slander". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  11. Loach, Ken (24 December 2004). "The truth about Perdition". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  12. Jays, David (24 June 1999). "A damnable shame". New Statesman. Retrieved 10 October 2019.
  13. Gibbons, Fiachra (23 April 1999). "Jewish anger at revival of lost play of the 80s". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
  14. Pinto-Duschinsky, Michael (13 January 2017). "Book review: Kasztner's Crime, by Paul Bogdanor". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
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