Playwrights From England

"When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance. Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?"

"Some have taken this episode as a cue to assert that no one knows more about racism than Jews, that no one has suffered more than we have. This is to play Abbott's game, to assert that there is a "hierarchy of racism", and that my pain trumps yours. But this is not a competition; and if it is, it's not one any of us would want to win. Instead, we should join hands with those who, like us, have endured racism and hatred for a long time. Jews, black Britons, Asian Britons, Muslims, Irish people, Travellers – we have one big, sad thing in common. Those who hate one of us tend to hate us all."

"[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ... The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [[Margaret Hodge|[Margaret] Hodge]], it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war."

"[Concerning a 2011 reissue of J. A. Hobson's 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study.] The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. Across eight pages, the then Labour backbencher lavishes praise on the book. ... The trouble is, Hobson was not just an accomplished analyst of international politics – for the Manchester Guardian, as it happens – but an egregious anti-Jewish racist. ... And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text. On the contrary, the bit Corbyn praised as "correct and prescient" was, in his words, "Hobson’s railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press," which appears squarely in the section where Hobson’s target is "this little group of financial kings", these "cosmopolitan" men who he had already identified as Jews. (The chapter, incidentally, is called "Economic Parasites of Imperialism," with "parasites" an image recurrent in anti-Jewish propaganda.) This is not a mere aside by Hobson that might accidentally be overlooked in a skim-read by a busy politician. There are pages and pages of it. No one is arguing that Corbyn was obliged to denounce the whole book. He could simply have nodded to the problem with a tiny caveat: something like, "Despite some passages that read uncomfortably to the modern ear ..." But there is nothing like that. ... A Labour spokesman has said that: "Jeremy completely rejects the antisemitic elements of [Hobson’s] analysis." But if that’s true, why did he not say so when he wrote about it?"

"[Referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working definition of antisemitism] [T]he only pro-Palestinian who needs to fear the IHRA is the one who wants to say Jews are disloyal to their own countries, that Jews are Nazis and that the very idea of Jews having a homeland of their own is "a racist endeavour". You can say all of those things more easily under Labour's new code – the age-old accusation of disloyalty, for example, is no longer classified as antisemitic – which is one reason why the vast bulk of the Jewish community opposes it. But the IHRA itself, properly applied, allows plenty of scope. You can, if you want, say everything the state of Israel has done since its birth has been racist. All it prohibits is branding as a racist endeavour "a state of Israel" – the principle that Jews, like every other people on Earth, should have a home and refuge of their own."

"The catharsis lasted all of three hours. From 10am on Thursday morning until lunchtime, British Jews were allowed to feel a small measure of relief: after nearly five years of being dismissed as liars and dissemblers, deceitfully engaged in an elaborate smear campaign, a neutral legal arbiter had ruled that those who had sounded the alarm about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were, after all, telling the truth. Yet the pause for reflection that so many had hoped for expired before it had really begun. It was overtaken by word that Labour had suspended Corbyn for suggesting that the whole business had been "dramatically overstated". ..."

"Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny. The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews."

"[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group [Deir Yassin Remembered] founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)"

"We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed, and the polls led us to feel sure, that Americans would not, in the end, hand the most powerful office on earth to an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar."

"[After referring to his March 2016 column cited above.] But these warnings were cast aside, dismissed as politically motivated smears rather than cries of pain and concern from a community that, for generations, had seen Labour as its political home. The dismissal came from the very top: when that column of mine appeared, Corbyn was filmed declaring it to be "utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness"."

"Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his suggestion that Jews might be born in this country but would never quite grasp "English irony"; his praise for a book that blamed 19th-century imperialism on finance houses run by "a single and peculiar race"; his warm embrace of a man who had repeated the ancient lie that Jews consume the blood of gentile children – pick your example – it was Corbyn who made British Jews feel an anxiety they had not known for the best part of a century. It was he who acted as a magnet, drawing in assorted cranks and bigots to join a party whose great name they soiled by their very presence."

"Prewar Jews, like today's East End Muslims, also lived in unforgiving poverty. They too were herded into the cramped streets of East London as the first stop for new immigrants. They too were reviled as outsiders, branded as parasites on the indigenous society. And they too were feared as a potential fifth column, suspected adherents of a violent, supranational ideology. The "Jewish menace" was said to be first anarchism and then Bolshevism. Today's "Muslim peril" is jihadism. This is what grieved some of those mourners most. As they huddled together in fear, one spoke for all when she said: "This is so wrong. We should be on the same side.""

"Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions, a block of flats on Vallance Road in the East End. It killed 134 people, more or less instantly. Among them were two sisters, Rivvi and Feige (pronounced fay-ghee). Feige Hocherman was 33 and she left behind two children, a son not yet 11 and a daughter aged eight and a quarter. The little girl was my mother, Sara. The war was in its final weeks and the bomb that fell that morning would be the very last V2 to land on London. It wasn't a targeted missile, though if it had been it could hardly have delighted its masters more. For of the 134 people killed by that Nazi rocket, 120 were Jews."

"I am the son of that terrified little girl and I always will be."

"As a black woman I feel a responsibility to black people and to women. My responsibility is not to be compromising. Even if the content is not positively biased or doesn’t fall in line with an agenda or ideology, I want people to be satisfied by the honesty."

"Charlie saw her eyes were wet and he didn't know what to say because he wasn't used to thinking about people the way they really were, especially women: he only saw them as people who were going to be dumb enough to buy his line of crap or who were going to slam the door in his face and leave him eating tacos-to-go that night instead of sitting down at a Macdonald's. The Judge had asked him if he had any friends and he couldn't think of any, and he'd never realised it before."

"Maria fetched the letters, half-running. She was the most willing girl they had ever had, and within three months she'd be speaking good English, and a month later she would leave, as they all did, because her mother was sick in Tijuana: in other words, someone—often a close neighbour—had offered her even more money, a colour TV set and the whole of every Friday off as well as Sunday."

"He felt her watching him, maybe wondering if he was some kind of nut. He'd been wondering about that himself, as a matter of fact, during the past hour, but very slowly he was beginning to think he might not be any kind of nut at all, and that would make a nice change."

"Berlatsky noted these things because all his life he had noted things, like a sparrow picks at crumbs. You could miss a lot of chances by not using your eyes."

"He looked around at the peeling paint and the missing light-tubes and the juke-box with its 'Out of Order' notice stuck across the glass, and she knew what he was thinking: this was the kind of place that made you wonder how the hell it kept going, then a week later you come past and see it's shut down."

"The only person who saw the car go into the ravine that night was Berlatsky."

"For forty-three years Berlatsky had made a point of keeping out of trouble and now there was this."

"Questions of identity have always played a large part in my thinking and writing; and, of course, race is a key component of identity. Certainly for me, and certainly in Britain."

"It felt uncomfortably foreign, I would say. Obviously, it was the first time I had been in a country where everybody looked like me. But obviously, culturally, it was completely alien. And I found people in the street in St. Kitts actually were calling me "English".."

"A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. I am one of those writers who hopes to use character as a way of introducing the reader to a new way of thinking about the world."

"I never really see a book in the context of what went before because when I finish a book I try to press the delete button so that it’s wiped off the hard drive…"

"The Menace, in movie language, and especially among women, means a heart-throb, a lover, someone with wide shoulders and no hips. A Menace does not have long lashes or a profile; he is always ugly, generally with a crooked nose and if possible a scar; his voice is deep; and he does not say much. When he does speak, the scriptwriters give him short, terse snaps of dialogue, phrases like ‘Lady, take care!’, or ‘Break it up!’, or even just ‘Maybe’. The expression on the ugly face has to be dead-pan and give nothing away, so that sudden death or a woman’s passion leaves it unmoved."

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

"There were no dark trees here, no tangled undergrowth, but on either side of the narrow path stood azaleas and rhododendrons, not blood-coloured like the giants in the drive, but salmon, white, and gold, things of beauty and of grace, drooping their lovely, delicate heads in the soft summer rain.The air was full of their scent, sweet and heady, and it seemed to me as though their very essence had mingled with the running waters of the stream, and become one with the falling rain and the dank rich moss beneath our feet. There was no sound here but the tumbling of the little stream, and the quiet rain."

"[As a child] I was always pretending to be someone else … historical characters, all those I invented for myself. I act even to this day. It's the old imagination working, a kind of make believe."

"My novels are what is known as popular and sell very well, but I am not a critic’s favourite, indeed I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller and not reviewed at all."

"I write about the black experience, because it's what I know. But I'm always talking about the human condition, what human beings feel and how we feel. Given these circumstances, a human being will react this way: he'll be happy, will weep, will celebrate, will fall. So my books are popular in Asia, in Africa, in Europe. Why would I, a black girl in the South, fall in love with Tolstoy or Dickens? I was Danton and Madame Defarge and all those people in A Tale of Two Cities. I was Daphne du Maurier and the Brontë sisters in a town where blacks were not allowed to cross the street. I was educated by those writers. Not about themselves and their people, but about me, what I could hope for."

"The seed of the story [Rebecca] lay in du Maurier’s jealousy of Jan Ricardo, the first fiancée of her husband. "I know that she came across one or two letters or cards, fairly sort of harmless things, where Jan did sign 'Jan Ricardo' with this wonderful great R," says Browning, flourishing his hand in the air. It is a portentous curlicue that is emulated in the book."

"There are certain shows on certain channels that do try to appeal to a teenage demographic, and I think that always looks a bit suspect, like a dad dancing at a party"

"I feel like I could have been really effeminate, if I hadn’t gone to the school I went to. Where I felt like I had to toughen up. If I’d have been able to relax, prance around, sing in the street, I might be a different person now. I thank my dad for that, for not allowing me to go down that path. Because it’s probably given me the unique quality that people think I have."

"When I was younger and really busy, I think I did lose sight of who exactly I was. Mental wellbeing is something that is so important in any career but in acting in particular. That’s why friendship and family is so important to me."

"As an actor, I’m always in clothes that I wouldn’t necessarily choose to wear myself."

"Our intention in making Threads was to step aside from the politics and – I hope convincingly – show the actual effects on either side should our best endeavours to prevent nuclear war fail."

"He did hate doing it. It was alien to his nature. He reluctantly let himself be drawn into this thing, thinking what he would have done would have been a very passionate politicised scream of emotion, and what he was being pushed into was this box he didn't feel at all comfortable in."

"I remember years ago when [w:The Price of Coal|The Price of Coal]] was on television one evening [in either 1977 or 1978]. When I got on the bus in Chapeltown the next day it was full of miners coming off shift. I walked down the aisle and they just looked and said nothing. I'm scared to death until one man appointed himself spokesman and said ‘that were alreight, Barry’. I felt like an icon then, I can tell you!"

"He hated coming on the set and despised me because I wore white shoes."

"I wanted him to use all his experience and intuition and empathy with people who'd grown up around him in Sheffield and put that into the movie, and I would be [...] the alien force, who was the voice of what science can do, and I would kind of foist these horrible indignities and horrors on these people, and he would try and get them to behave the way they would. So there was an innate conflict in that. We had many shouting matches, really passionate things, totally necessary for doing this."

"I thought I would like to show that these kids can do something which is in fact very skillful - not the old tale about them being cobblers and joiners, but something that means they have to get books out of the library. And it’s a technical skill; they’ve actually got to read about it before they can do something like training a hawk. My brother trained a kestrel in these fields at the back, and I wanted to show that kids can do this kind of thing. They can do all kinds of things if only they’re given opportunities."

"I'd never heard of Ernest Hemingway, but when I read his stories I realised there was something special about this simple style, but I couldn’t understand how he got the effect. I realised there was something underneath it, and that's how the whole thing started to unfold for me."

"The trouble in school is that you can do so little to help kids because you come up against this dead end of the educational system. I think a comprehensive system is the only answer for these kids, if it is carried through properly. But education reflects the system, rather than changes it. People say it’s an instrument of social change; well, if it is, it’s a bloody slow one. I think education reflects the class system, and the system has to change before education can."

"I think that the book has survived as a set text because teachers like using it. It has a lot of possibilities from a teaching point of view. Most kinds of children seem to identify with the story. Northanger Abbey it is not! It should really be out of date now after all these years. But sadly, it's not. There are still a lot of kids like Billy around. Ken Loach's film Kes is a sympathetic retelling of the book. It adds value to it. Ken is a wonderful director for any writer to work with. I was very lucky that Tony Garnett the producer and Ken discovered my little book."

"I think it was the first novel I'd actually read in my own time, and of my own volition. I'd actually sat down and read a book, and I was 21. Ridiculous. I can't remember reading anything before."

"I think that I painted an accurate picture of what life was like for someone like Billy forty years ago. Looking back, maybe I was not as sympathetic as I could have been to some of the adult characters."

"How often are 'dreams realised' in real life? I write about real people and show a section of their life. Without the Hollywood endings which rarely happen outside Hollywood. My memory is failing me these days and I cannot remember the exact details, but Walt Disney offered to make Kes. On the condition that the hawk recovered. Should we have sold out? I know which way would always be right for me."

"The problem...was...how to induce the nations to disarm while they were afraid to do so, because, as Murray all too clearly perceived, "war can still be made, and there is no certainty that the nation attacked will be defended by the rest of the League". Nor were stricter and more elaborate obligations to support the League the answer...because, Murray pointed out, the present obligations were perfectly adequate, if only – if only – the members of the League lived up to them. That a man like Gilbert Murray could see so plainly the paradox on which the League of Nations was insecurely built, and yet remain the League's wholehearted supporter and propagandist, indicates how easy it was for faith in the League to blind the faithful... For the League of Nations itself the Japanese aggression raised as an urgent practical issue that fundamental question of power – military and naval power – which had so troubled Gilbert Murray in theory, but which had always been ignored or played down by most other moralising internationalists. Here was a bandit state engaged in open robbery; now therefore was the time for the law-abiding powers of the world to uphold the law against the wrongdoer; to act as policemen. Unfortunately the policemen had been persuaded to give up their truncheons."