The premiere of Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children at the Royal Court theatre 16 years ago proved to be one of British theatre’s most controversial opening nights.
Audiences were immediately divided by the British playwright’s deliberately stripped-back treatment of Jewish generational fear and Israel’s history of conflict.
The public attacks it prompted have echoed on. In 2022, Churchill was deprived of the lifetime European Drama award she had received earlier in the year, due to criticism of the play and her pro-Palestinian campaigning.
Now the play has been filmed and is to open officially in London at the end of this month, at a time when the Middle East has been rocked by devastating violence and, in Britain, allegiances are more contested than ever.
Behind the film is London-based Omri Dayan, a 23-year-old US-Israeli director, who said this weekend that he was “braced” for all the contention to come, but was drawn to make his version “not because of its politics, but because of its humanity – for me it is a family story.”
Like the play, Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza tells its story through glimpsed moments of Jewish family life. It starts with the Russian pogroms of 1903 and finishes with the 2008-09 Israeli action in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. With a repeated refrain, each family questions in turn what they should tell a young daughter – setting up taboos that, it is implied, will have serious consequences.
Making his film, Dayan said, was the first time he had embraced his heritage in his work. “This play made me realise that I am Jewish, I am the son of Israeli parents, and this is a story I need to tell,” he said. And it was a family project. The director’s father, Ami Dayan, and his grandmother – the Israeli actress Rivka Michaeli – are in his cast. “Because the film is rooted in family, them being right beside me really helped,” said Dayan. Churchill, 86, has given the film her approval.
Made by a crew of 50 which worked for nothing and included Israelis and Palestinians, it will be shown free on Monday 31 March in London, at the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square, to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians. It will then be released on YouTube. When Churchill wrote the play she stipulated it could be read or performed anywhere as long as no admission fee was charged and a collection was taken for this charity. The director hopes the film will go on to be shown to invited groups in universities, schools, community groups and synagogues.
“The script is so clear, even though the issue is so complex,” said Dayan. “The play did an incredible job of showing what different positions have been taken, as well as looking at the times we are in. I hope that the film helps in the same way.”
Before the film starts, a note on the screen spells out it was made before the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel. However, Dayan and his team were editing the film that day. “We took a break for a while,” he said, “because I didn’t want what we did to be a reaction. We had all known, of course, that there was going to be another chapter one day. It is incredibly sad.”
While he anticipates protest, as well as support, Dayan said he hopes that audiences from all sides will listen. “We hope that [we] can guide people to a place where they are not putting up their usual defences,” he said. “Everyone has a view, but we are asking them to put those aside for 15 minutes, to let the characters speak. Then afterwards, if they want to, they can pick up set attitudes again afterwards.”
Some critics at the time argued the play was antisemitic. The Times’s 2009 review said it was evidence of “straitjacketed political orthodoxy”, while novelist Howard Jacobson described it as a “hate-fuelled little chamber piece” in the Independent, warning it was part of “a gradual habituation of a language of loathing”.
Jacobson added: “Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to ‘chosen people’ territory – feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase – once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff.”
In contrast, the Guardian’s Michael Billington praised Churchill for capturing “the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter”, adding: “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.” In the aftermath of the row, the Guardian also ran a full transcript of the play.
Dayan believes many attacks on the play “had no true merit” because the people criticising it had not seen it. “There is a real fear that goes down generation to generation that Churchill shows. This play should be seen as something that can help explain it,” he said. “Instead, there was a real jump to delegitimise it.”
Last week the BBC’s board apologised for “significant and damaging” mistakes in the production of a documentary on Gaza which featured the son of a Hamas official. It has now been taken down. Dayan said he had not seen the programme, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, but believed it should still be available to watch. “I don’t yet know the details,” he said, “but it should be shown as long as there is full disclosure. It is very difficult to tell these stories now, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. My instinct is that it should be seen. Discussion is the most important thing.”
Such divisions in culture and over media coverage must be fought if they lead to censorship and “cancellation”, he argues. “We have already been disinvited from showing our film at festival for the Jewish community at a centre in New York.”
Influenced by Lars von Trier’s film Dogville, Dayan set his film on a basic sound stage, with different domestic spaces marked out on the floor: “My first thought had been to set each scene in its location, but it didn’t work,” he said. Dominic Cooke, the original director of the play, has saluted his choices, calling the film “a terrific achievement”. “Caryl’s vision of an Israel trapped in cycles of trauma is sadly more pertinent now than ever,” Cooke added.
Dayan said he hoped reaction to his film would take the form of conversation, not argument: “I’ll be pleased if people see it, even if they go on to disagree about it. That was part of the intention of making it; that, and the fundraising.”
