Rootless Cosmopolitans

‘Rootless cosmopolitans’ was the snide euphemism for Jews in Stalin’s USSR.  Permanent outsiders, people who don’t belong, can’t be trusted – and yet are also greedy, much too powerful, etc.  Every antisemitic cliché that has justified pogroms, persecution, exclusion, the Holocaust and the simmering suspicion and antisemitism that never goes away – and always threatens to break out.  When I was a kid, ‘Jew’ was an insult.  Such is the subject of Ron Elisha’s play.  That and contemporary ‘cancel culture’.  Billed as a comedy, it’s not that funny – except for those flashes of mordant and distinctly Jewish wit we expect in the face of everyday frustrations, and discrimination, fear and attack.

Ira (Anton Berezin) is the Artistic Director of a theatre company he has built from insignificance to international fame.  As such, Berezin plays it as an intelligent, canny guy who could achieve that.  Before, that is, his segue into anger and bewilderment when things fall apart.  His constant psychic companion is his dead but ever-present mother Freda (here a one-note and not very Jewish Babs McMillan) who’s like a Jiminy Cricket conscience or the Mother in Woody Allen’s segment of Tales of New York.  In other words, the classic – or cliché - Jewish Mother, a nagging, controlling, berating conscience – and the source of most of the play’s laughs.  Freda makes constant reference to the Holocaust.  Ira has had enough of it, but Freda does it so often that they have a jar into which either one of them must toss a coin every time. 

But really, all is well.  Ira is a success – despite being a Jew, and married to a tall blonde shikha, Glenda (an almost too sweet Emily Joy) who has inexplicably converted. 

When the contemporary context enters into the mix, the play qua play becomes a little muddled.  Ira’s Girl Friday, PA Georgia (Seon Williams) shows him footage of the Hamas 7 October terrorist attack on the internet, before it is ‘taken down’.  But then Ira sees the demonstration at which the demonstrators chant, ‘Gas the Jews!’  He is appalled and outraged, but we don’t know what he heard until much later in the play, when he tells us.  Why not hear it when he does?  The chant happened first at the pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Sydney Opera House on 8 October.  (And it goes on happening, as we know.)  Ira, who is more Jew-ish than Jewish, is urged on by Freda, and posts what we take to be a pro-Israeli or anti-Hamas tweet…  And it’s all downhill from there.

According to his program note, Elisha originally intended his play be about ‘submarine antisemitism’.  He wrote the initial text before the Hamas attack of 7 October, but once that had happened, reference to it was unavoidable.  Ira’s response – his tweet - is the trigger for his cancellation – that is, his being dumped from the theatre company or, as the euphemism has it, ‘Let go.’  We are not told what he said in his tweet (a serious omission, missing a dramatic opportunity, in my opinion), but we understand it’s enough for the Board of his theatre company to give him the shove.  Naturally, neither the tweet nor Ira’s Jewishness are mentioned.  Of course not.  It’s all smiles and reasonableness.  The Chair of the Board, Viola (now a very arch Emily Joy) easily persuades ambitious Georgia to betray him.  For Georgia, who knows plenty about discrimination – she’s Asian – the tweet is just politically naïve.  Nor does she care about Ira being a Jew; for her it’s just a career move.

There’s a scene where Ira learns that Georgia has betrayed him – but it’s an unexplored plot point: he gets it, he’s shocked, and… blackout.  For me, another missed dramatic opportunity.  In the aftermath – somehow, it’s three years later – cancelled and out-of-work Ira is trying to get back into theatre with a play he’s written.  Unfortunately for him, he’s still persona no grata, and his play is a heartfelt piece about the plight of Jews that certainly doesn’t tick any of the correct boxes.  Desperate Ira is out of step, and out of time – and his play – or what we hear of it - is more a rant cum pamphlet than a play. 

The problem here is that while everything in the play is demonstrably true up to this point – in terms of cause-and-effect, cancel culture and antisemitism hidden and overt – it stops short of saying anything about what has happened and is happening in Gaza since 7 October.  (Or, indeed, before 7 October.)  And what’s happened has given every antisemite, of whatever stripe, the perfect excuse to come out loud and strong and be loudly, unmistakably, brazenly antisemitic.  For them to scream that all Jews without distinction are to blame and so they may act accordingly.  We can see why the play stops short, but we are puzzled when it does, and it seems evasive.  For a play ostensibly about antisemitism, it has not much to say about antisemitism – only about its victims and they, of course, are real enough.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Gavin D. Andrew