← Unholy: Two Jews on the News
Loading summary
Transcript84 lines
- [00:00]
A
This podcast is brought to you by. Cyber attacks can be prevented. Checkpoint. You deserve the best security.
- [00:10]
B
Four killed in the west bank settlement of Ely. Thirty different incidents of revenge attacks following that episode. Much going on. And we also have an interview with theatre Royalty. It's Unholy. I'm Jonathan Friedland of the Guardian in London.
- [00:29]
C
And I'm Yanit levy of Channel 12 in Tel Aviv. Unholy. Two Jews on the news from Keshet podcast. It's theater Royalty on Unholy Today. I mean, we've had great thinkers and historians and journalists and politicians here and there, like really astute interviewees, but never, never theater royalty. Finally, after 108 episodes, Mr. Friedland, you realized how to impress me. I'm very proud of this interview today. I'm so looking forward to it. You know, I've told you the story about how in my family growing up, my mother, in her study had two pictures of our family and the other picture, significantly larger of Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, so as to signify and to illustrate that theater is more important than real life. And, you know, the message has cut across.
- [01:28]
B
Well, that is perfect because it is one of Lord Olivier's successors as artistic director of the National Theatre here in Britain, who is our guest. He is the former artist and director of the National Theatre, Sir Nicholas Heitner, but just an absolute legend in the medium. And you're right. So we'll talk to him later. It is amazing that we. I haven't done this till now because, you know, I'm a theatre buff. I think you take that to another level. You're somebody who has literally, you know, crossed thousands of miles and come to London not that long ago in order to go to the theatre. You're one of those people who instead, when others would look at the sort of weather map to see what the weather's going to be like on holiday, you reach for the theatre listings first. And we have somebody who is a knight of the theatre who has huge things to say. So many hits to his name, so many important plays that he directed. We're going to get into all of that with him later on and I'm.
- [02:33]
C
Going to pitch him my idea for a musical about the news. I'm just saying I'm reading the musical. What do you think?
- [02:39]
B
108 episodes. And it's taken till now to think of that.
- [02:42]
C
What rhymes with disaster? Just think about it for a sec.
- [02:46]
B
Lots, actually.
- [02:47]
C
Plaster. See, we got our opening number. It's done. We got to pitch this to him.
- [02:51]
B
It's A hit. Why do I suddenly have an image of that scene in the Producers where they're waiting for the reviews to come in? No, I think, yeah, Unholy the Musical, maybe we'll say. That needs some work, I think will be what our guest will probably say. Love it, guys.
- [03:05]
C
It needs tutors on the news. It rhymes in the title. You should, you know, you should really think deeply about this.
- [03:11]
B
I'm on it. But, you know, people don't often, I think, describe theatre as a medium of escapism that tends to be TV and movies. They talk about that. But this, I suppose, where people would want a bit of an escape from the news because some of it has been pretty grim, especially where you are.
- [03:30]
C
Yes, look, it hasn't. It's been one of those weeks with so much news coming out of Israel. I'm hard pressed to think when it wasn't that kind of week. But yes, as you say, four Israelis were killed in Eli in the West Bank. They were killed by Palestinian gunmen. The youngest is Nachman Moduf, age 17. The terrorists opened fire at a restaurant in a gas station. And this is a tragedy for four families. What happened after was two things. First of all, growing calls from the right side of the coalition or the far right side of the Netanyahu coalition, and influential settler leaders who have been pressuring the government to aim for a larger scale offensive in the west bank military, let's say, officials saying that this might actually lead to more casualties on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side. But this has been a growing call from that part of Israeli society. The other thing that has happened, you mentioned that in your intro, of course, is that we have seen escalating violence from hundreds of settlers, particularly rioting in the village of Tumus Ayah, a Palestinian village. They were setting fire to Palestinian houses and cars. An Israeli policeman shot, accidentally shot a Palestinian in those riots. This is becoming more and more what we are seeing after these terror attacks. We talked about Khawara in February, same sort of modus operandi. And you ask yourself, wait a minute. I mean, Palestinian terror has been here even before the establishment of the state of Israel. What is happening now that we're seeing this frequency of revenge from the settler side. There are people in the defense echelon Israel saying, look, this is a government that doesn't have its hand in controlling this part of Israeli society. If you have someone like Itamar Bengevir as the minister of National Security, that's not going to be the grownup in the room saying you should not take the law into your own hands.
- [05:26]
B
So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is now a pattern. I mean, obviously I was in Israel. It made a lot of headlines around the world in April when a British Israeli family were gunned down in a similar attack. The Dee family, Lucy Dee and her daughters, their surviving husband, father is a rabbi. That got a lot of attention. But there have been other attacks. And so do people say there's a pattern emerging here, that this is now perhaps even a tactic by those who are perpetrating these attacks? And if it is, does it need a different kind of response?
- [06:05]
C
Well, definitely. We are in the midst of what looks like a terror wave. This has been going on for a few months before Netanyahu took office. It's happening in the west bank more and more because it's easier for terrorists to pick up weapons and shoot at Israelis in the West Bank. It's just simpler that way. It's not that there aren't terror attacks inside the Green Line, but this is an indication of the fact that the Palestinian Authority is weak and growing weaker. And it is an indication also of the fact that the Israeli government has its attention elsewhere. We have been talking for months here about the judicial overhaul and when this happens, not that the Israeli government is not trying to deal with terror, of course they are. But the response on the other side, when you have these acts of revenge from Jewish settlers, it's very hard to try and clamp down on this. When this is the situation on ground, it's very, very, very tense. I'll just add one more thing that happened yesterday that is seemingly unconnected, but I think very much connected is the Druze community in the northern part of Israel rioted against. The official reason was wind turbines, but that's not really the reason. They're sort of very angry about discrimination, about the nation state law, about what they think is building permits that are too slow, this in violence against policemen. There were four of the rioters that were injured. There was weapons used on both sides. This is again another indication, I said it's seemingly unconnected. It's another indication that this government isn't tough enough in the areas. Again, the attention has been, the bandwidth has been elsewhere. It looks like it's losing control over its own civilians.
- [07:45]
B
And these price tag attacks, as they have always been called, in which Jewish settlers, Jewish militants try and say that there will be a price paid by Palestinians for attacks on settlers. What's the public attitude again in sort of inside mainstream Israel, non settler Israel towards Those attacks, when people see the faces of the four dead in Elie, is the response empathy, sympathy for the price tag, retribution, or of people exacting those attacks repudiated by mainstream Israeli opinion? Where, where do people stand? Israelis stand on that.
- [08:23]
C
First of all, there is a deep sadness over the tragedy of, of four dead there. I don't feel like there is support for these, these events, these incidents of, of price tag. I think the mainstream Israel is still very much against these, these sort of acts. Very shocked after what happened in Hawara and shocked after what we're, we're seeing now. I mean, we spoke about the military generals calling what happened in Hawara pogrom.
- [08:47]
B
Now, you mentioned that the government has in some ways been distracted. And obviously people who listen to this podcast will know what we mean by that, which is the last six months really have been all consumed by the government's program of judicial reform. Opponents call it a judicial coup. One thing which would normally be of interest really only to the absolute anoraks, a British term, people who are obsessive about the minutiae, which is elections for the Bar association. You know, the representative lawyers group. Elections for that job normally wouldn't make headline news, but in this era they do because that bar association obviously has two seats exactly on the appointments committee that appoints judges. One of the central battlegrounds of all of these arguments over judicial reform. And there were elections for the head of that association this week with a result that I think some people who've been following the protests and supporting them would have been quite heartened by.
- [09:46]
C
Yes, because again, the Netanyahu government over the past couple of months has managed to lose the big battles and the small battles. This is a relatively smaller battle for who will head the Israeli Bar Association. As you said, it's important because they have an important part in the judges appointments committee. The coalition wanted one candidate, Effi Naweh. The people who protest this coalition wanted another candidate, Amit Becher. He is the one who won with a landslide. So that is an important indication, you know, where lawyers are in Israel. That's also an important group to discuss. And that is bad news for the coalition. Netanyahu, we should say, said this week quite clearly that he will resume the legislation. What this means, I'm not exactly sure I can tell you because first of all, the secession of the Knesset is going to end at the end of July. Then, you know, Israel, we have August and the high holidays. And so this is going to take a while. Even if Netanyahu's stuck Between does he want to work with the opposition or does he want to basically cave to the pressures of his own coalition? Now seems like he's going through this and saying I'm going to pass this very, very moderately, as he said very carefully. But that is where he is heading.
- [11:00]
B
You said that he's losing battles both big and small. Last time we talked about his failure or supporters of the reforms, failure to get a person elected from the Knesset onto the Judicial Appointments Committee. Instead it was an opponent of the reforms who got that place. And you put a very interesting gloss on that, which was in some ways that helped him Netanyahu, which explained. So what about this one? Is there a way that he can put a gloss on this loss in the lawyers group? I mean perhaps he can do it by saying, well that goes to show that the lawyers are all leftists and elitists and, and shows all the more reason why we need to have reform. How does this.
- [11:40]
C
There was a different sort of line from Likud lawmakers which is let's dismantle the Bar Israeli Bar association or let's change again the makeup of the Judicial Appointments Committee so lawyers won't have a place in it. Look, at the end of the day, we're still in the situation that says Netanyahu is playing for time here. And as I said, legislation is he will do it. I mean the mistake, the biggest mistake made by this coalition is saying we're going to try to steamroll the whole thing, the whole package, quickly as possible that failed. So now he's saying I'm going to moderately pass at least the reasonableness clause. He says, by the way, the opposition agreed to that. The opposition said whatever we discussed was with the term end of claims. Right. That whatever we agree on that will be the end of the judicial overhaul. But again, we'll have to see in the coming weeks how fast he's trying to pass this. It is still a minute part of the original plan of his legislation. We need to remember that, that the.
- [12:36]
B
Reasonableness clause of course being this notion that the Supreme Court could overturn decisions of government of the Knesset on the grounds that they were unreasonable. And for Netanyahu and his allies, that was seen as being an overreach, an over mighty power by the judicial branch.
- [12:56]
C
Yes. Well now we're going to press pause on this politics reality conversation and walk into the wooden O with me, wouldn't you? I have too many years of studying modern British drama and English literature to not enjoy the next conversation we're having.
- [13:21]
B
So as we said we are absolutely thrilled to have a major figure in the world of theatre as our guest. The leading director of the theatre for the last several decades here in Britain and in New York and elsewhere. To his list of credits includes the History Boys, Miss Saigon, the Madness of King George, the Crucible on film as well a whole string of smash hit plays. Was the artistic director of the National Theatre. Now the founder of Artistic director of the Bridge Theatre in London. He was knighted and therefore officially would be Sir Nicholas Heitner. We're going to call him Nick. Nick Heitner. Welcome to Unholy.
- [14:07]
A
I'm really. I'm really delighted to be here. Thank you.
- [14:09]
B
We are so glad you're with us. Now. One of the big sort of backstories to this imitation is that both Jonit and I are devotees of the show Guys and Dolls. That show is back on in London at the Bridge thanks to you. Your production of it. And it is an absolute blockbuster. It is so terrific and has revived into my mind the true spirit of the show and sort of brought out the essence of it more brilliantly than any other I can remember. Jonit was so excited by that she literally flew to London to see it. So that we're going to be fans in this conversation. We should warn listeners. But the big innovation in the show is you have the audience as part of the action. They're standing effectively in a kind of pit on the stage where all the action is moving in and around them. We used to that a bit with Shakespeare, including Shakespeare productions you've done at the Bridge, Julius Caesar and so on. But I don't think it's ever been done before with a Broadway musical. So where did that brilliant idea come from?
- [15:12]
A
I don't know whether it's been done with a Broadway musical. It probably has because in the end everything's been done before. Where did it come from? You said we did a couple of Shakespeares like this Julius Caesar, really obvious play to try to do that with because the audience can be the people of Rome and gladly were. I remember when I first started going to the theatre in London seeing shows that were done like this. Promenade shows. They were called there. Now they're called Immersive. It's just that's the terminology that gets in the audience these days. I saw absolutely brilliant production of the Medieval mystery plays at the National Theatre by Bill Bryden in the very early 80s. I think this was started in London by the visit of Ariane Mnuchkin's company from Paris who did a Show which I must have seen when I was not much more than 16 or 17 on a visit to London called 1789, where the crowd were people of Paris storming the Bastille. I think if you make theater, if you make films, the first things you see register with you very strongly. And along with Peter Brooks production, famous production, Midsummer Night's Dream, I suppose in a way I've been trying to recapture the spirit of those ever since. So I'm not going to claim any superior originality. I think that's how art gets made. You, you are influenced in ways you don't even acknowledge to yourself by things you've read, seen, listened to, and then there they are in front of you again.
- [16:57]
C
Jonathan mentioned, I flew to see it. I flew to see it with my dad. We saw different versions, including the Nathan Lane on Broadway in 92 over the years. Your production is remarkable. I remember kind of sitting in the audience and looking around, and one of the amazing things about it is people are enjoying it. Kids are enjoying it, their parents are enjoying it. Enjoying it. The grandfather is enjoying it. Right. It's like a Rolling Stones concert. It speaks to all these generations. But I saw their theater in other plays in London and I looked around at the theater and I was probably the youngest person there. I'm not that young. And I wonder how you keep theater as something that matters to the TikTok generation. Not only to me and my dad.
- [17:39]
A
It's a combination of things with Guys and Dolls. This music is really cool in a way that quite a lot of the music that has been written for musical theatre since brilliant though much of it is, is not cool. I think big band jazz is cool to everybody. You think about Amy Winehouse, devoted to Tony Bennett. So does that. There's the fact that it does for the people who want to stand draw on experiences that they're really accustomed to going to concerts, standing for concerts. Also the tickets, this is really important, are really cheap. And the way we can do that at the bridge, explaining that 400 odd people stand and 700 people sit around them, still very close to the action. The 700 who are sitting subsidize the ones who are standing. It means that the people closest to the action are in many ways the youngest and the most enthusiastic. And you talk about the TikTok generation. I think I'm not alone in thinking that the more digital the world gets, the greater premium audiences will put on live. I went to see Beyonce at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Beyonce, even if you're standing relatively close she's tiny. You watch her on the big screen. But she sold out a huge football stadium five or six times in London because the TikTok generation, the online generation, wants to be there live, even if they can't see the live Beyonce very big at all. Live will, I suspect, get more and more important the more digital the rest of the world gets.
- [19:21]
B
You gave an interview. It's now nearly 30 years ago. You were a very precociously young guest on Desert Island Discs, which is a kind of British radio institution, where normally people look back on a whole long life, and you were on very, very young. But you said then that you. The musicals of the 1940s and 50s would kind of joyful and optimistic, partly because of the times that they were written in and that later we would become more cynical and more ironic. And you said then that's why we have to. Almost have to. We need to go back to those. Because they have something. And I'm just thinking now, all these decades on, they've been, you know, there are still people writing new musicals, but something about those ones, Guys and Dolls and west side Story, other ones you've been involved in, you know, what is it about them that makes them work nearly 100 years on and kind of. Why isn't it that we're. We're, you know, that newer musicals don't have that same essence?
- [20:23]
A
Well, there are neomusicals which in every way measure up to them artistically. The entire oeuvre of Stephen Sondheim is absolutely magnificent. But Sondheim's pieces are complicated, ambiguous, a response to the darkening of American society and the darkening of our response, I think, to what's going on around us. So we can't avoid now the conversation about what part Jews played in the creation of the American musical, because the American musical is basically a Jewish form. There's only one great composer, creator of American musicals that I can think of who wasn't Jewish. Cole Porter, who famously said to Richard Rogers once, I believe in Venice, before he'd had a hit, he'd tried several times, Cole Porter. And Cole Porter said to Richard Rogers, I understand what I got to do now. I've got to make my shows more Jewish. And there are songs in shows he wrote after that, which it has been pointed out, like, sound like that, my heart belongs to Daddy Da da da da da da Daddy. It sounds Jewish. So why? Because they are the ultimate melting pot art form. So much gets. And I'm going to say, you know, I got to say up front, I think they still stand as an example of what you can do in the theater. There's no nonsense about cultural appropriation. Here are some first generation Jews. Irving Berlin, first generation Jew, mostly second generation Jews in the great melting pot city. Shamelessly, joyfully, proudly drawing upon any number of traditions and channeling them into this great art form that and people borrowed back and forth. You know, Jewish composers borrowed from jazz and blues, they borrowed from African Americans, African American jazz musicians then borrowed back straight. But Miles Davis improvised a lot on themes by Jewish composers of American musicals. I think the Jewish community in New York, the Jewish creative community in New York was a kind of crucible for everything that fed into that great immigrant city. And I just think that Jewish artists were really well placed to pick up on everything that was going on and kind of feed it into this. It's not even a hybrid form, it's a form of its own. And I guess in the 30s, 40s, 50s, it was still possible to be wholly optimistic about what the great American melting pot experience was and would be. And these highly cultured Frank Lesser, they weren't always mega cultured. Frank Lesser was born to an incredibly cultured German Jewish family. Abe Burroughs, who wrote the book, was knocking out gags on American radio. The director, George Kaufman was great director, great playwright, great comic playwright, but was known as a rather austere, remote figure. Would tutored them in a way, all of them right there. When it was possible to be upbeat about the way the world was going.
- [23:54]
B
But can the record show, by the way? You need that. Nick got us to the.
- [23:59]
C
He did, he did. We were planning to steer him there, but he took it because I normally.
- [24:03]
B
Feel obliged to do two or three general questions before I go Jewish. And you got us right there. I was going to head there anyway, but I am delighted I got that.
- [24:11]
A
Because I knew these shows through my grandparents. They were on the Radiogram every weekend. So I got there through a 100% Jewish route. So I can't avoid it.
- [24:25]
C
It's interesting Jonathan mentioned the Desert Island Discs. This is a program you did in 93, and one of your discs was Guys and Dolls. And listening to it now, I was wondering, did you think then that you would want to do this one day or you. But, you know, so many years have passed since the golden age of Broadway and so much has happened to America and to the musical theater. Were you worried about, you know, a show called Guys and dolls in 2023? Were you concerned that someone would say, this is, I don't know, misogynistic? This is problematic. You know, any kind of thing like that or did that go through your mind?
- [24:58]
A
Yeah, it did. It did. And there are things in the show which are a direct response to that concern. I loved the show. Like, I. The first time I saw the show was in a legendary production here in London at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre. And it took. That was in the early 80s.
- [25:15]
B
82.
- [25:16]
A
Yeah. So it took 40 years for me to feel confident that the. That memories of that show had faded sufficiently. And then there were two generations who hadn't seen. Was an absolutely brilliant show. So, yeah, back in the 90s. No, I never thought I would do it. Same way I never thought I would do Miss Summer Night's Dream, because the Peter Brook production was so seared vividly in my memory. But time passes and it's time for another go. You're absolutely right that there are things in the show which, through no fault of the show's own. Now, sit. Oddly, I'll give you an example. Sky Masterson, the professional gambler on a bet, takes Sarah Brown, the upright Salvation army sergeant, to Havana. And while there, they go bar hopping and she asks for a drink and she asks for a milkshake. And in the show as written, he deliberately orders for her a cocktail, a dulce de leche. He gets her drunk and it turns out fine. Given the opportunity to seduce her, he turns it down because he's a decent bloke. But it did feel that you put on stage now, in an entirely joyful musical, the spectacle of a man deliberately getting a woman drunk and you turn the audience right off. It's in fact possible to turn that on its head without really changing a word, as long as Sarah Brown knows what she's drinking. As long as when Skye Masterson says to her, she asks in the script, what's in this? He says, bacardi. I'm sure the original intention of the people who wrote it was she didn't have the faintest idea what a Bacardi was. Soon as she knows what Bacardi is and decides to get drunk on her own account, the whole thing is fine. It's turned on its head. That's followed by a cat fight in another bar, where, again, it's very 50s, she starts to scratch the eyes of another woman out for dancing with her man again. You can change that without changing a word by having him take her to a gay bar and she attacks the guys for dancing with her guy and the audience feels right at home. Quite interesting, actually, that gay bar thing, because I just thought, do you know, Skye Masterson is cool, totally comfortable with himself. Straight guys like dancing in gay bars and I suspect always have, and Havana is a very gay city. But my goodness, the response to that from, I mean, none of it negative, but the response to that has been, oh, gosh, is he trying to tell us something about Sky Masterson's secret sexuality? No, he's just a straight guy who likes dancing with guys. I thought we were all supposed to be okay with that now.
- [28:13]
B
Yeah, the new generation's take on it is amazing. My son overheard a conversation between two millennials. And one said to the other, what did you do last night? And the other said, oh, I went to see a show called Guys and Dolls. And the other one said, oh, what was it like? And she said, no, staging was great, it was really good. But the story was really, I mean, very problematic. It was about gambling and misogyny, which I just think is hilarious when you know the show. But the other point that's new about the show I think is what's. What was already there. And that is your rendering of Nathan Detroit, who I think, if people have seen the film, think of him as this sort of almost smooth, charming, Sinatra like figure, because Frank Sinatra played him in the film. You've brought him back to being this kind of chancer, wheeler dealer, wide boy, which we'd say. And I'm predictably going to go back to the Jewishness here because that's truer to the original rendering of this character. And I want you to tell us a bit about that and even about this song lyric that he made his own.
- [29:22]
A
Well, yes, Sinatra really did not want to play Nathan Detroit. He should have been playing Sky Masterson. But they got Marlon Brando to play Sky Masterson, who couldn't really sing. And Brando and Sinatra absolutely hated each other. And then they had to write extra songs for Sinatra because Sinatra was a singer. They wrote Nathan Detroit originally for a great Broadway star called Sam Levine, who was as Jewish as they come. And it's a really Jewish part. Or write already I'm Justin o'. Gudnik. Or write already so new. I mean, that's Jewish, but in a way it's not even Jewish, it's New York. Because my experience of New York is that even the non Jews unaffectedly speak Yiddish because. And I'm not even sure they know they're doing it or use Yiddish expressions. And Damon Ronyon, who was not Jewish, wrote kind of basically about Jews, these midtown small time gamblers who gather in mindy's Deli, based directly on Lindy's Delhi and on 52nd Street. I think they all feel Jewish to me. To the extent that whenever anything really bad has to happen in Damon Ronyard's stories, they have to import the guys with guns in from Brooklyn. The Italians have to come in from Brooklyn or Chicago. I have no doubt Damon Runyard now would be accused of grotesque stereotyping. But he writes about these small time Jewish gamblers, particularly his narrator, always getting in terrible scrapes. There is a texture to the part of Nathan Detroit which is not smooth.
- [31:06]
B
Just because you mentioned Sam Levine. I grew up with the cast recording from my dad that I inherited. We're talking about our family associations with this show. And he had the Sam Levine cast recording, which, you know, is still in my head. But you told me this fantastic thing about the lyric and particularly this business about New and how Sam Levine kind of struggled with it, which I love.
- [31:27]
A
Well, Sam Levine couldn't sing. Sam Levine was. You can kind of hear this on the cast recording. But almost everybody involved in Guys and Dolls first Time round wrote memoirs. Abe Burrows wrote memoirs. Cy Fuer, the producer, wrote brilliant memoirs. Frank Les Daughter wrote a memoir of him. So you know all the stories from reading all those. They had to give Sam just even a small chance of getting the note right. Sue me, sue me. So they had to write just a phrase to climb him up there. Call a lawyer and sue me, sue me. I'm singing it very badly. Oh, I love it. Call a lawyer. And was put in just for Sam. And he still apparently got it wrong one time out of 10. And Nathan Detroit has to sing a couple of times in the ensemble for Be a Lady Tonight, which is Sky Marsterson's song. He's in the ensemble for Sit down youn're Rocking the Boat, which is Nicey Nicely Johnson's song. And he was ruining it. And all these mighty Broadway Jews had a terrific fight before the opening night about which of them was going to go backstage and tell Sam he wasn't allowed to sing. He only had to mime so that he didn't ruin everybody else's numbers where he was supposed to be singing in the backing ensemble. So, yeah, but they loved him. They loved him. They knew he brought something to the part that a better singer wouldn't bring. So they didn't write him any solo songs. And that was something that they had to solve when Sinatra played the part in the movie.
- [33:04]
C
So we can talk about Guys and Dolls forever, but I do want to talk about your legendary career, which started out you, the Jewish kid from Manchester, going to Cambridge, I think, wanting to be an actor but realizing pretty quickly that it's going to be a director. I'm going to step on a cultural stereotype and ask if you. Your parents wanted you to be a lawyer or a doctor or they were happy with a theater career.
- [33:29]
A
Well, they were pretty good about it. I think my dad, who was a lawyer, would have liked me to be a lawyer, and his parents would have been absolutely horrified. Who were the first generation immigrants into Manchester? And his mother must have got wind of where I was going because, remember being told almost every time we went around to see them that acting was a lovely hobby, but it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. But they were really supportive, actually, so that was fine. Yeah. I think knowing you're a bad actor and knowing you can't write is a pretty good start for a director.
- [34:11]
C
I'm reminded of something we mentioned, your book. There's a story you tell there when you were made director of the national, and you say there that you were ready for the question, which actually arrived in a press event there. You were asked how, I think, how is it that again, there's a male, a white male from Cambridge, who is appointed to that position? And you had an answer. You said, I'm part of two minorities, I'm gay and I'm Jewish. So that I hope that is a good enough answer for. For whoever asked the question. But I wonder how, when you look at the conversation happening today, when you hear this claim that only Jewish actors can portray Jewish characters, that only gay actors can portray gay characters, is that at all something that you relate to?
- [34:56]
A
It's not really, but it is complicated. And I think David Baddiel, in his brilliant little book, Jews Don't Count, does this much better than I do. No, obviously all actors should be able to play everything, but there are minorities who have been so misrepresented and underrepresented in movies and on the stage that you absolutely understand where they're coming from when they claim at least priority when it comes to playing parts that represent their minorities. So as far as Jewish parts are concerned, Jewish material is concerned. It would feel very odd to me to watch Jewish material with no Jewish input at all into the creation or staging of it. But I don't mind seeing non Jews play Jewish parts, and I don't mind seeing straight people play gay parts. And I'm sure there will come a time when this is in the past and we're all cool with everybody playing everything and we're cool again with writers writing about anything they care to imagine. But I understand why we're kind of going through a transitional period now. I hope it's transitional.
- [36:16]
B
A thought has popped into my mind just going back to the thing you said about the optimism and hope of those Jewish performers and writers and composers putting on these joyful shows, writing these joyful shows with. I love the idea of Cole Porter's the outlier, he's the minority. The rest of them are all the Jews. But the thing that's in my mind is the timing that is in the post war period and the realization that when they were doing these joyful, exuberant, life affirming shows just a decade earlier or even less, the darkest event in Jewish history had occurred. And I just want to. This is something I've toyed with in my mind. I just want to write past somebody who knows the medium better than anyone, which is in the 60s, within a space of about 18 months of each other, there were three shows on Broadway. One was Fiddler on the Roof, another one was Cabaret and the third show actually was a film. It began as a film and then would become a Broadway show. So it doesn't quite work, but it is the Producers by Melbourne and all three Jewish creatives behind them. It seems to me that all three are in some ways about dealing with, and also not dealing with the Holocaust. They all come at differently oblique angles. Cabaret is about Weimar Republic, Fiddler on the Roof about the shtetl, the world that had been lost. And the Producers is about Jews laughing at Hitler, somehow mocking Hitler. So I don't know what you'd make of that, but I just wonder if all those Jews in Broadway sitting in Lindy's and making a up mindes and being joyful were also in some way wrestling with this other thing and not knowing quite how or finding new ways, indirect ways to come at it.
- [37:58]
A
Yeah, I don't feel expert on this and I think both of you would probably be able to answer this question better. But I think it essentially took until Claude Landsman for the showa to be properly discussed, properly addressed in some form or another. For 20, 30 years after the war, everybody was in denial, weren't they? And not so much in denial as not able to confront the full enormity of it. You could write Fiddler on the Roof. Now. Fiddler on the Roof marked a huge sea change on Broadway where the Broadway Jews finally wrote about being Jewish, directly wrote about being Jewish. There had been no Jewish material, no explicitly Jewish material until Fiddler on the Roof. I mean, you can say that Guys and Dolls is Snatchers are Yiddish. A lot of the characters plainly are kind of based on Jews.
- [39:02]
C
But nobody's saying Nicely is a really famous Jewish last name. So Nicely. Nicely. It's a very Jewish name.
- [39:11]
A
Yeah, but, you know, Johnson. You just don't know, do you? It's Stubby K played it originally. And I don't even know whether Stubby Kay was Jewish. I bet he was. Was he? No.
- [39:24]
B
I don't know. I was shaking my head because I also didn't.
- [39:26]
A
No, but I think. I think. I think a big sea change happened in the 60s, by the way everybody addressed what had gone on. And even that took a long time. The producers. It was the 90s before it was a musical. Somehow, even after the show has been fully revealed and fully discussed, Mel Brooks can do what the hell he wants.
- [39:53]
C
True. That's true. I want to ask generally about you managing to. Your book is called Balancing Acts. I mean, you really do sort of talk a lot about how. I think it's a line from your book. We want to make art and we want. But we know we're in show business. That kind of tension or that balancing act between, again, doing art and selling tickets. And I wonder, just as, you know, you did so much Shakespeare, is there a Shakespeare play you wouldn't touch because you'd think this would not bring in the crowds?
- [40:27]
A
Yeah, well, that wouldn't stop me from doing. From doing it. I kind of did come into the whole business of theater directing to do Shakespeare. There's a huge tension in me, I think, in all British Jews, between the two traditions that we drunk in from when we were children. I feel deeply steeped in the world of Shakespeare and the work of Shakespeare. I kind of. Although it was seeing and listening to the American musicals that first got me alert and interested. When I discovered Shakespeare, that's what I wanted to do. And Shakespeare is, from the British point of view, the original balancing act. He was a shareholder in his company, one of six shareholders. He was. He was very, very interested in money. He retired when he could, and he wrote really great, interesting, challenging stuff. But when he wrote a flop, it was not published. It was quickly forgotten. Not that he had anything to do with publication. During his life and almost all of his career, he was adapting plays that were already. Or adapting stories that were already, some of them in the company's repertoire to make them better, to draw in bigger crowds. So the idea that there is a difference from Shakespeare's point of view between the popular and the artistically successful. That division would not have occurred to him or his colleagues nowadays. Yeah, you go back to the least popular of all his plays. I had a great time with Timing of Athens. I don't think there is a single one of Shakespeare's plays that you can't make attractive in this country, certainly, where, without even knowing it, they're part of the way we think, the way we feel and the way we speak. Shakespeare so profoundly influenced our language. Try doing Ben Jonson, his equally successful contemporary. If in some thought experiment you imagine Ben Jonson being the cornerstone of not just the dramatic repertoire but of English literature, we'd be speaking in a different way. If you try putting on Ben Johnson now, he's great, but oh, boy, is he hard to understand. Shakespeare is kind of as popular as he's great. Still.
- [42:52]
B
Still, I want to ask you about your own side by side working encounters with a writer. He's not Shakespeare, but he's one of the absolute giants of the medium, and that is Arthur Miller. You interviewed John Lal, the biographer of Arthur Miller, at a really great event at Jewish Book Week in London a few months ago. And just very casually, you just slipped in that you had actually sat with him with his fingers over the keyboard on a rewrite of the Crucible. And afterwards you remarked that it was a bit like imagining yourself next to William Shakespeare going, okay, here's how Hamlet. How can we tighten it up a little bit? You know, so just tell us a bit about Arthur Miller working with him. And one of the things that was very interesting in that conversation was the notion that we perhaps had slightly misread Arthur Miller and imagining him in a slightly more narrowly political way, rather than seeing that some of his themes were actually about humans and families and so on. So I'm piling a lot in that, but I want to hear what you said.
- [43:54]
A
He was, on first impression, a titan. He very much lived the role, I think, of Arthur Miller. He was tall, he was incredibly striking looking. It took a while to gain his trust, but he was absolutely pragmatic. He knew about movies. He obviously knew about the theater. He knew what kind of job needed to be done to make the Crucible a movie rather than simply a film version of his play. Once we had a working relationship, he was eager to try to imagine what it might feel like, look like on screen and do the work that was required. So, yeah, it did feel to me impertinent to be sitting there Saying the first act of the Crucible, kind of one of the most perfectly constructed pieces of theatre that ever written. You would teach it, if you wanted to teach a playwright, a young playwright, about how to disguise a hell of a lot of exposition. It happens in real time in the bedroom of the child. Essentially what I was saying was we have to untangle this and play it kind of in a rather banal way as a series, a linear series of events, rather than have these events regurgitated around the bed of a sick child. It was an example of why movies are sometimes over literal and the theater can concentrate things into a much more metaphorical space. But he was happy to do that. The play still existed, so he didn't care. I can't say I felt that it was possible to get personally very close to him. I think he was a great artist, a great man who had lived through and participated in some great turning points in American history. And there were bits of him that I felt he put forward for public consumption.
- [45:51]
B
Because you were there in the house, right?
- [45:52]
A
Yeah, yeah. It was surreal. It was surreal. A couple of weekends I went to stay in the house where he had a writing hut overlooking his swimming pond, where he'd written a hell of a lot of his great stuff. But there was only one time I told John Lardis when we did our event, when I caught him slightly off guard when we were talking about casting. We're talking about casting the role of Abigail Williams, who is the manipulative teenager at the center of the play. It's still a massive success whenever it's put on the Crucible. There's a very successful production in London at the moment. But, you know, I guess the Crucible is what you might call problematic too, in that the catalyst and the problem is a manipulative girl, a servant, who it turns out the hero, John Proctor, has had an affair with. It's core relationship problematic. My goodness. There is a much older man, a teenager in his employ, and there's an affair. And the play kind of gives her a whole lot of sticks for creating the witch scare, which is the center of the play. So I was asking about casting this part. He knew none of the young Hollywood movie stars, so I asked him to describe how he saw her, literally how he saw her, and he replied, well, the thing about Marilyn was that everybody forgets this, this incredible life force. And I hadn't asked about Marilyn Monroe, it just came out. And the play was written, not just. I think. And I think now this is not just me who thinks this not just in response to the McCarthy witch trials, the McCarthy witch hunt, the HUAC. It was written as a personal response to what was going on in his own marriage. He'd just been in Hollywood with Ilya Kazan, he'd met Marilyn Monroe. I don't think anything had happened yet, but he plainly came back to the east coast in turmoil, to an unhappy home, to a wife to whom he was unhappily married. And somehow, in writing about the girl who destroys or looks set to destroy the marriage of John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth Proctor, he channels Marilyn Monroe into that part, is what I believe. I think I'm not the only person with that thought, but I absolutely, hand on heart, swear that when I asked about Abigail Williams, he talked about Marilyn Monroe. It's the only time he mentioned her.
- [48:38]
C
Wow, that's amazing. You are a treasure box of theater and film stories. I mean, I could ask, how is it to direct Judi Dench? Or how is it to direct Judge, you know, Maggie Smith? It must be quite a daunting thing for someone who started out so young in theater.
- [48:54]
A
Yeah, it is daunting. I've never directed Judi Dench in a play. I only directed Judi Dench once, for.
- [49:01]
C
About half an hour for the national celebration, wasn't it?
- [49:04]
A
In a gala. In a gala celebration of the National Theatre's 50th birthday, in which she did a great speech from Anthony Cleopatra, and she was a sublime Cleopatra. And she came for one tiny rehearsal and at the end she did the speech. It was dazzling and she said, any notes? I've got no notes, Judy, how can I give you any notes on that? But that's who Judy is. She genuinely wanted feedback. It didn't matter that we'd never worked together before. Maggie Smith I've worked with a lot and Maggie is. Maggie is an acting genius. There's nothing she can't do. She. She beats herself up all the time until she gets to a place where she thinks she's giving it her best shot and she never really gets there. She's driven by a sense. I think a lot of great artists are like this, driven by a sense that she can never quite achieve what it is that she wants to achieve. I didn't direct. Jonathan Kent, colleague of mine, directed her monologue at the Bridge Theatre a few years ago, four or five years ago, where she played. The play was called A German Life. She played Brynhilde Pomsel, one of Goebbels typing pool, a woman who lived to the age of 102, refusing ever properly to acknowledge that she was complicit in what went on when she was working for Goebbels, a woman who lied to herself and gave herself away through her lies. And I've never seen a piece of acting like it. And it was radical in its simplicity, that it was as if Maggie was saying, I've played enough dowages, I've played enough eccentrics. This is what I can do when I do nothing. It was like being in the room with a 100-year-old German woman. It was astonishing.
- [51:15]
B
It's funny you mentioned something like that, because I didn't see that. And that means, I think, that I won't be able to see it, really.
- [51:23]
A
No, she wouldn't film it. She did 50 performances. She wanted to prove to herself that she could still do it. She learnt a monologue that lasted 1 hour, 40 minutes, and once she'd done it, she was dissatisfied with her performance. She always is. But she had at least proved that she was still the business.
- [51:46]
B
No. So, I mean, this may end up being our last question, but it makes me wonder about how you approach the question of legacy, because some of your greatest work, Will, has passed in the sense of it's not frozen forever on, captured forever on film. And so, I mean, Yonit was saying before this conversation that, you know, her grandchildren, mine too, actually, would be able to watch the 1954 version of Guys and Dolls, which I think we all agree is inferior to your brilliant new production, and yet that's the one that people will be able to see. And so, I mean, is there any angst in you about the notion that you'll find work will live on in the memories of the people who saw it, but can't endure longer than that?
- [52:33]
A
There's no angst. It's the nature of the theater as a medium. It's its glory, really. I have made a small handful of films. I'm not a great filmmaker. If I watch them now, all I see is what. What I got wrong. I don't really like watching them. It suits me just fine that things live on in the memory. Things live on in my memory. I have a feeling if I went to see them by some magic time machine, I'd be really disappointed. There are quite a lot of the shows I did at the national which are preserved forever, because when I was at the national, we started broadcasting to cinemas, preferably live, but a lot of the shows we did, National Theatre live, they still exist. It's great. It's great that they exist. It's great that we were able to broadcast them live, but when I watch them, I think everybody's over the top. They're shouting because the camera is recording something which was never designed to be for the camera. So it's kind of great they're there. But that won't happen to Guys and Dolls. And I couldn't be more delighted if there are people who think that was a really great show. I wish my kids could have seen it. That suits me fine.
- [54:00]
C
Nicholas Heitner. Sir Nicholas Heitner. We're so delighted. It was such a pleasure and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us.
- [54:07]
A
I really loved it until you used the sir word. That's. That was my.
- [54:12]
C
I waited with that. I waited for the whole conversation.
- [54:16]
A
Thank you so much. No, I've had a great time.
- [54:17]
C
Thank you.
- [54:18]
B
I think Nick Hunter just gave you a note there.
- [54:20]
C
You'll need kindly.
- [54:22]
B
You know, we loved it, but let's lose the sir. Thanks very much, Nick.
- [54:26]
A
Thank you.
- [54:27]
C
Thank you. I could have gone on. On the conversation. We could have. It could have been a two hour conversation. I think we just pulled back for. I don't know why I wanted to ask more and more. That was just fantastic.
- [54:46]
B
Yeah, no, he's such an interesting and thoughtful man. And as I noted when we were speaking, I was delighted that the person who brought it to the Jew stuff was not me or you, but him. And that notion, that conception of the Broadway musical as an essentially Jewish form and how that comes about and the melting pot that is represented by that form, it goes to a bigger thing which we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast, is that really for the 20th century, American culture was Jewish culture. It was true in the literature, true in the theater. But he brings such a different sort of angle and take onto it. And, you know, partly because he just does it so brilliantly. In case people haven't got. Got the message, do go and see Gaea's house if you're able to do that. It really is something a bit special. So as tradition demands, we have awards to hand out and a very crowded field for one, but not so much for the other. Yonit.
- [55:44]
C
Yes. I think that there's a golden ticket of the Chutzpah award this week. It can only go to one person. Remember the story we discussed about the head of the Shast party in Israel, Ari Aderi, saying that his way of supporting Holocaust survivors is giving them a 50% discount in their burial plot? We thought that that is the chutzpah to win all chutzpah awards. But, no, I think our candidate this week actually tops even that. I'm talking about Minister Meir Porush of United Torah Judaism. He gave an interview this week to the Israeli military radio Galatal, and he was discussing the reservists saying they will not show up for military service if the judicial overhaul goes forward. We discussed this many times. This is his quote. He says, in a democratic country, one cannot agree that a person simply says, I'm not enlisting because I don't agree with the government's policy. It is crossing a red line. End quote. Now, I refer you again to the fact that the man saying this is a minister from the ultra Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, predominantly the ultra Orthodox part of Israeli society. Do not enlist. They are exempt from military service. So just maybe general advice. If you represent a community that doesn't enlist, maybe you don't want to critique any part of Israeli society that does. Just general advice.
- [57:10]
B
I mean, it is breathtaking. They managed to always find a new low in our chutzpah competition, as you say. We thought we'd reached the nadir, but there's always more egregious chutzpah. It is absolutely sort of definitional stuff when you fault someone for not doing what you yourself refuse to do. So, yeah, outrageous chutzpah. In our mensch competition, we said slightly crowded field this week. You know, several candidates. I'm just going to mention two sort of posthumous winners, really, which is Daniel Ellsberg, famously a whistleblower in the Pentagon Papers case. You know, heroic stance he took to reveal the truth of the prosecution of the Vietnam War at great personal cost, or his. Even the office of his therapist was broken into his psychiatrist by the Nixon White House. He became a sort of enemy, a target of the Nixon White House. Daniel Elliot Ellsberg died this week, age 92. And then the British Jewish community came out in huge numbers. I myself was there for the funeral of Sir Ben Helfcott, described in the Jewish Chronicle this week as the powerhouse who lifted us all. Ben Helfcott was a Holocaust survivor at a very, very young age, as a young teenager who came to Britain and made a new life for himself in spectacular fashion and represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games. He captained the weightlifting team of Great Britain and won a bronze medal in international competition just 10 years or so after being out of the camps and liberated after having been sent to Buchenwald, among other places. It's an extraordinary story. It was an extraordinary life. He was A huge figure in this community, involved in Holocaust education, speaking at schools. He was for the last 30 years the best known Holocaust survivor in this country. But just as an example of how somebody can survive the worst trauma any of us can imagine and build a new life with children and grandchildren and physical strength, Ben Helfcott became a sort of iconic figure in the Jewish community. Here, a posthumous Mensch of the Week award for Ben Helfcott.
- [59:36]
C
Agree with both. I'm just going to interject with an extra Mensch award under the headline It's Never too late to do the right thing. Tel Aviv University this week removes the Sackler family name from its medical center school, we should say, following many institutions around the world that have removed the Sackler's name. The Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museums, Oxford University. But this was the name on the medical school in Tel Aviv University. If you missed that whole story of the Sackler family and its marketing a painkiller as a non addictive painkiller, the OxyContin story, the role they played in the epidemic of opioids in the United States that led to hundred thousands of deaths. All of you should see. I'm sorry, I have to recommend this. I recommended it to you and to the rest of it and to our listeners. This is all documented beautifully in the series Dopesick. But finally, after many years and pressure put on the Tel Aviv University, they have removed with the consent of the family. We should say they prefer to do it that way. But the name has been removed from the medical school after 50 years.
- [60:42]
B
Yeah, it took a long while. As you say, other institutions around the world had done it sooner. We are benignly inclined here and we believe that it is never too late to do the right thing, as you say. And so that is a welcome development. If you have enjoyed this week's podcast with the news with the interview with theatrical royalty and all the usual delights, do please spread the word. You can do that at Unholy podcast on Instagram, on Facebook. Do spread the word. It all helps.
- [61:16]
C
And we will say our thank yous to Gaia, Glazer, Omer Primat and Romatik and we shall meet next week.
- [61:28]
A
This podcast is brought to you by Cyber Attacks can be prevented Checkpoint. You deserve the best security.