Seven Jewish Children

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Date	Time	Venue	Notes	Prices	Booking Link
Available Performances
Dates in February
Fri 6 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Sat 7 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Mon 9 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Tue 10 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Wed 11 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Thu 12 Feb 2009	9:30pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Fri 13 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Sat 14 Feb 2009	9:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Sold out Performances

Reviews

4 stars The Guardian

Caryl Churchill’s 10-minute play was written in response to the recent tragic events in Gaza. It not only confirms theatre’s ability to react more rapidly than any other art form to global politics, but also makes a fascinating counterpoise to Marius von Mayenburg’s The Stone, which precedes it at the Royal Court. Whereas The Stone shows how German children are often the victims of lies about family history, Churchill’s play suggests Israeli children are subject to a barrage of contradictory information about past and present.
The work consists of seven cryptic scenes in which parents, grandparents and relatives debate how much children should know and not know. It moves, implicitly, from the Holocaust to the foundation of the state of Israel through the sundry Middle East wars up to the invasion of Gaza. At first, the advice indicates the deep divisions within Israel (“Tell her they want to drive us into the sea” / “Tell her they don’t”); at the end, it becomes a ruthless justification for self-preservation (“Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe”).
Churchill, I’m sure, would not deny the existence of fierce external, and internal, Jewish opposition to the attack on Gaza. What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter. Avoiding overt didacticism, her play becomes a heartfelt lamentation for the future generations who will themselves become victims of the attempted military suppression of Hamas.
Performed by nine actors, under Dominic Cooke’s brisk, clear direction, the play solves nothing, but shows theatre’s power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage.’
Michael Billington, Wednesday 11 February 2009

4 stars The Times

The history of Israel in ten minutes? It sounds like a bad bid for notoriety by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. But this new play by Caryl Churchill is an impassioned response to the events in Gaza that is elliptical, empathetic and illuminating. Written last month, rehearsed fast by Dominic Cooke and his cast, the play is free to attend and also free to read online (at www.royalcourttheatre.com).
In seven conversations that take us from Holocaust to Hamas, Churchill’s unnamed characters talk of survival, identity, defiance and aggression. These aren’t conveyed as clunky Big Questions but as urgent domestic quandaries about how much to tell an unseen girl about the situation. From “Don’t tell her they’ll kill her” in the first scene to “Tell her were the iron fist now” in the final scene the fear remains, but the attitude hardens.
But Churchill is not just stating that victims can become aggressors. She shows people wrestling with whether to define themselves by their situation or by some broader notion of humanity. Wrestling with what innocence means. “Tell her there are still people who hate Jews”, says one character. “Tell her there are people who love Jews”, says another. “Dont tell her to think Jews or not Jews”, says a third.
The writing is rhythmic and spare. There are no heroes or villains, for all that Churchill decries what is happening in Gaza. There is just the constant colliding of the two big, mutually exclusive truths of our lives: we’re just like everybody else, and we’re nothing like anybody else. If its brevity makes it inessential as an evening out (it’s staged at 9pm, after Marius von Maybenburg’s The Stone ) then rest assured that it reads as well as it plays.’
Dominic Maxwell, Friday 13 February 2009

The Observer

You don’t have to pay for a seat for Seven Jewish Children, though there’s a bucket person at the door collecting for Medical Aid for Palestinians. Even so, it’s remarkable how many people, on the sleetiest day of a grim winter, trekked into the Royal Court for 10 minutes’-worth of Caryl Churchill’s words. They won’t have wasted their time. Though you could argue that as a response to, rather than an analysis of, recent events in Gaza, the play is actually rather slow off the mark, it still shows how relatively flexible theatre is in seizing on topical subjects: film can’t react quickly and telly mostly doesn’t bother. The Court should make a habit of staging such reactions.
What’s more, though there’s no mystery about Churchill’s reaction to the Israeli bombing – she’s against it – she produces more than an agitprop shout: this is a far more substantial piece of work than her invective against America and Britain’s “special relationship” staged three years ago. On the page, these brief scenes, for which the only specification is that they should be spoken by adults, look as if they might be spoken by only one person and talking about only one other. In fact they’re intended to be orchestrated into argument, and to be divided between different speakers.
Dominic Cooke dispenses the lines perfectly in a production that begins by looking mechanical – characters scatter and come together around a discussion as if they were iron filings – but then builds and changes. The early sentences invoke the Holocaust; the later clearly talk of Gaza. But none of them are really addressed to anyone other than the speaker. They seem to care but are really a blood-letting. The more you speak, the less you say. The more you go on, the less you are actually talking to someone else. Tell that to an audience and, weirdly, they seem to respond.
Susannah Clapp, Sunday 15th February 2009

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