It’s been described as anti-Semitic, as a “ten-minute blood-libel” and as a “hate-fuelled little chamber-piece”, and it may be coming to a theatre near you, next weekend.

‘Seven Jewish Children’ is a very short play by Caryl Churchill, a leading English playwright. She wrote it in a matter of days in response to the war in Gaza, the Royal Court Theatre immediately decided to stage it, and it went on two weeks later, piggybacking on their scheduled evening show.

Entry was free, and performances were followed by a collection for Medical Aid for Palestinians. Now, Churchill has made the play available for free online (at www.royalcourttheatre.com): anybody can perform it, without need to acquire the rights, so long as they hold a collection. The inventive Dublin collective, Project Brand New, has responded by co-ordinating a series of performances around the country next weekend.

Lynne Parker is directing a performance to be staged after a preview of the new Rough Magic show, ‘Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer’, at the Project Arts Centre next Saturday. Project Brand New hope there’ll be up to 20 other performances around the country. (Contact them on projectbrandnew@gmail.com, or check their Facebook page, or www.theatreforumireland.com, for details from midweek.)

Popular culture may be defined by the always-on and participative features of Web 2.0, but Irish theatre has typically remained rooted in a more ponderous model: events happen; the writer thinks about them; eventually, a play is written; and later still, an audience sees it. The idea that a leading playwright can respond to a shocking international event within days, and that a key theatre can have that play on within weeks, is a revolutionary one.

Make that play available for free, via the web, and you have a formula for a theatrical event to fit the ‘age of Obama’: a combination of politics, performance, and virtual media that has immense potential to democratise and politicise the theatre.

But politicise it for what? According to some of the responses in Britain, Churchill’s play is less an exercise in broadening the political reach of the theatre, than an exercise in broadening the appeal of anti-Semitism. In the London Independent, Howard Jacobson wrote that it was “Jew-hating pure and simple”. In the Spectator, Melanie Phillips wrote that the play was “an open vilification of the Jewish people”.

The play is in seven short scenes, set at key points in recent Jewish history, in each of which a group of (presumably) Jewish people is discussing how to explain recent events to a young girl. “Tell her it’s a game,” it starts. “Don’t tell her they’ll kill her. Tell her it’s important to be quiet.” The context is clearly the Holocaust, and a family hiding from the Nazis or their agents. By the final scene, where a family is debating how to explain the war in Gaza to a young girl, the tone has become cruder. In the play’s only speech, just at the end, the (unnamed) character cracks:

“Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,” the person says. “Tell her they can’t talk suffering to us… tell her we’re the iron fist now…. tell her they’re animals.”

Taken on the face of it, Churchill, a gentile, and patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has written a play about Jewish history, of Jewish characters, in which she posits that the Jewish people, brutalised by the experience of the Holocaust and displacement, are exacting a proximate revenge on the Palestinians. At best, that’s crude psychological determinism. At worst, it’s classically anti-Semitic, as her critics have charged.

The context of the production – being disseminated and performed for free, and accompanied by a charitable collection – clearly give it the ring of propaganda. If this is truly Churchill’s view of Jewish history, and of the ‘Jewish mindset’, then she is a lesser dramatist and thinker than her reputation allows.

But, on my reading, Churchill’s instincts as a playwright trump what the critics assume to be her intentions as a propagandist. Every line in the play contains the seed of its opposite; the whole play is riven with doubt, rather than ideological certainty. Churchill is exploring mindsets, rather than saddling an entire people with the one mindset. And with no instructions as to how to allocate the lines among different characters, there is ample opportunity for a sensitive director to create a performance that is provocative without being entirely polemic.

This seems to be how the Project Brand New team sees it. Conceding that some people will shy away from it following the furore in the UK, Jody O’Neill says that they see it as a unique opportunity for the theatre to respond quickly to a humanitarian crisis. Rather than advocating any particular politics, she sees the play as being a way of “getting the theatre community involved, getting people talking, and raising some money”.

Is that noble, or naïve? See for yourself next weekend. Or better still, stage it.

For the Irish Independent February 28 2009