Nicholas Hytner
Our World Aids Day Service
guest speaker
Friday 29 November 2019
It’s a massive pleasure to be here. It would be an exaggeration to say that the last time I spoke from the bimah was at my bar mitzvah, as I’ve been asked many times over the years to talk in synagogues – including this one - about the theatre. But I can’t remember ever addressing a congregation during a service. I’m really happy that it’s LGBT+ Jews who have finally called me up.
I’m a proud Jew, but when I’m asked whether I’m a practicing Jew I don’t really know what to say. I’m not a synagogue member, so that’s a strike against me. And I never pray. But of course, being Jewish, or being gay for that matter, goes beyond ritual. During my childhood in Manchester, I was a regular at the Manchester Reform Synagogue at Jackson’s Row, which is where I was bar mitzvah. And although my life in the arts has only occasionally intersected with Jewish subject matter, I think there’s been an unmistakably Jewish theme to it. For a start, I’m pretty sure that the audience for everything I’ve ever done has had a significant Jewish contingent. Or everything I’ve ever been to, for that matter. My love of classical music started in the early seventies on Sunday evenings at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, home of the Hallé Orchestra, where the dress circle audience was essentially a replay of Saturday morning at Jackson’s Row. It was because I found the Sunday concerts meant more to me than the Saturday services that I dropped shul with ostentatious adolescent certainty. Many of us who are immersed in the arts like to claim that there is spiritual sustenance enough to be found in them, that we don’t need the intervention of religion. Certainly, the performing arts are a beacon for the kind of secular Jew who can make more sense of a Mozart quartet than the Talmud. They are also, of course, a beacon for observant Jews, without whom the audience at the Wigmore Hall, the Barbican and the National Theatre would be very thin; and probably very much less opinionated. But it’s not a surprise that a people whose religious texts are built on discussion, debate and argument should love the theatre so much. The theatre thrives on conflict, and the best plays worry about how to live properly in a way that seems to me at least to overlap with centuries of Jewish thought. The Talmud, after all, is peppered with what a theatre director recognises as dramatic dialogue, satirical sketches, elaborate build-ups to Rabbinical punchlines. So the theatre has been a magnet for Jews, and also – of course – a magnet for anyone whose sexual or gender identity doesn’t conform to the expectations of the majority. When I think of the many overlapping communities of which I’m part, it’s the London theatre community I think of first. I’ve intermittently been part of the New York theatre community too, which has equalled and even eclipsed ours in its ferocious support of HIV related causes. It makes a whole lot of sense to me that the theme of World Aids Day 2019 is that communities make the difference. But I’m not sure whether I’d have had any kind of a life outside the theatre. Manchester was a fine place to grow up Jewish in the sixties and seventies but, for me at least, it was no place to be gay. My childhood was a lesson in the limits of tolerance. I’ve never wanted to be tolerated. Toleration isn’t nearly enough. I was brought up by well-meaning liberal parents, and I was suffocated by what they thought was their tolerance. There were often lawyers round the dinner table, and there was a lot of talk about the Woolfenden Act, as if it was unusually virtuous to support the legalisation of homosexuality; and I guess at that time, in that place, in that community, it must have been. But there was no doubt that to be queer was to be sad. This wasn’t exactly reassuring to a closeted teenager. At the time, I was half-thrilled and half-tortured by what I was getting up to with my best friend in the lighting control box of the school theatre. In some respects, I was a confident, sometimes over-confident schoolboy. I certainly had the confidence to try to get the Headmaster removed as director of the school play as I thought he didn’t know what he was doing. I think now what a difference I could have made if I’d had the balls to tell everyone what I was doing in the lighting box. But I didn’t, and it took me too long to realise that the genuinely courageous boys were the ones who allowed themselves to be mocked for their effeminacy. They weren’t settling for toleration. They were already on the road to pride. Things change. The congregation at Jackson’s Row is preparing to move out and hand the premises over to Manchester United legend turned property developer Gary Neville, who will build them a new synagogue on the same site. A part of me will mourn the old Jackson’s Row, even though it’s decades since I was last there. But there was nothing to mourn except my own teenage timidity when I last went back to Manchester Grammar School. I was shown round by a sixth former who told me that he’d been chosen as my guide because he had so much in common with me: obsessed by the theatre, and gay. He offered to tell me where the best clubs were, but I gave that a pass. It was the theatre community that allowed me room, slowly, to become myself, and I’ve been very lucky. It’s in the theatre that I’ve found what others find in shared worship. It’s through the theatre that I’ve understood myself and the world around me. Though it’s left room for plenty of other astonishments. It’s astonishing to me that tonight has been the second Shabbat dinner I’ve attended in as many weeks, and that last Friday’s was somewhere I could never have imagined I’d be breaking bread. I’d never been to Poland before I joined a party organised by World Jewish Relief. I’d always wanted to go, but I was afraid of what I’d find. Or rather, I was afraid of what I wouldn’t find. I suppose I assumed that all traces of Jewish life had been obliterated; that the great, vibrant culture that erupts from the books of Isaac Bashevis Singer was long dead. Thirty years after Poland threw off the Soviet yoke, Warsaw is bursting with life, but Jewish Warsaw exists almost exclusively as a memory. The desperate remains of a tiny section of the ghetto wall still stand as a memorial to the hundreds of thousands who were imprisoned by it before they were slaughtered. Behind it, but much more inspiring, is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The story of a millenium of Jewish civilization is told there, and despite its terrible ending, you come away with a sense of the stunning variety of everything that went before. There’s a beautiful reconstruction of a wooden synagogue and a wonderful gallery devoted to the artistic and intellectual life of interwar Warsaw - a golden age of creativity, commerce and political radicalism. Still, I thought, that was then. So nothing prepared me for Kraków, and I hope you’ll forgive me if you know this already. The historic Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, is perfectly preserved - as evocative as anything in Europe. There’s a terrific Galicia Jewish Museum. There’s a Jewish Cultural Festival every year. There are many splendidly restored synagogues. And right in the centre of town is the Jewish Community Centre, the focus of the achievement of a group within World Jewish Relief called Connections. Here, against all the odds, is a real community of Jews at the heart of Jewish Poland. Our party shared Shabbat dinner with them. They pay particular respect to the small group of survivors, but I was seated among some of the students that the Connections programme support. The theatre students in particular excited me, but they are all fascinating, and their stories are as different as they are inspiring. There were Ukrainians as well as Poles, and a Canadian student who’d chosen to live in Poland. Some of them discovered their Jewish heritage only recently: their parents and grandparents kept it secret from them. They’ve seized it gratefully, and they seemed to me to form a bridge to the creative and intellectual ferment of the Jewish past. Some of them are less religious than others; all of them are proud of their heritage and want to know more about it. And there are two hundred Jewish Studies students at the famous Jagiellonian University in Kraków: most of them aren’t Jewish, as if the rebirth of Jewish Poland has caught the imagination of a new Polish generation. I asked the students at the Jewish Community Centre about antisemitism. They claimed that in Kraków, at least, it’s not an issue. They were more concerned about what they’d heard was going on in Britain. So I asked them about the situation for the LGBT community. One student, who came from Kiev, said that in Poland, the legal protections that come with EU membership have to be set against a culture that is inhospitable to gay rights. Ukraine, he said, has no legal protection for LGBT people, but it’s culturally more plural. It’s a country that’s formed from a patchwork of ethnic and religious minorities, so homophobia isn’t high on the agenda of bigotry. So I’m sitting at Shabbat dinner in a Jewish Community Centre an hour’s drive from Auschwitz, discussing LGBT rights with a group of Jewish students and – honestly – I think I was as close as I ever have been to the God I don’t believe in. Much, much closer than I ever was at Jackson’s Row. Though maybe not as close as when I’m directing Shakespeare. The great classics of the stage require interpretation and reinvention every bit as much as the great religious texts require them. And the business of commentary and interpretation seems to me to be central to the Jewish tradition. So is the insistence that tradition is wholly compatible with modernity. I think most Jews find the whole notion of fundamentalism utterly alien: what’s a text for if not to argue over? So it’s probably no surprise that Jews have flourished in the arts, with their characteristic urge to marry respect for tradition with a spirit of critical enquiry. And Jews have another advantage in the arts, an advantage shared by the LGBT+ community: we’re outsiders who by and large have no problem living and working inside the larger community. So we’re at home among artists whose job description includes the requirement to be able simultaneously to look from the outside in and to understand what’s going on from the inside out. It’s what actors do. It’s what comedians do: if you tell a funny story about yourself, you’re looking at yourself from an ironic distance at the same time as suffering the world’s indignities from the inside. That feels quite Jewish, and quite gay, to me. Hector, the shambolic old teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, says something about literature that used to strike audiences with the force of revelation, and it always seemed to me to sum up why I do what I do. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” It’s a characteristically inclusive thought. Alan Bennett isn’t one of those playwrights who demands you keep up with him; he’s more concerned with the sigh of recognition, the insistence that in the theatre you cease to feel lonely. That you recognise yourself in a disreputable old schoolmaster, a smelly old lady in a van, even in a mad king. He insists on empathy. At its best, the theatre conducts a kind of ethical enquiry that the Jewish sages might recognise. The implicit result of that enquiry is that we’re best to treat others as we’d like to be treated ourselves, which – though banal when stated baldly – is a requirement at the heart of all the great religions. It’s a requirement that is particularly pertinent on World Aids Day. After my bar mitzvah, I walked away from Jackson’s Row with a teenager’s certainty that there was nothing out there that required my worship, no religious imperatives that demanded my observance. I can’t pretend that all these decades later I’m any closer to the God of my forefathers. But fifty years on, I’m immensely proud as a Jew and as a gay man to be with you this evening, and I’m very grateful that you asked me to talk to you. |
World Aids Day
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