On the style of court dramas: The story of Jim Allen's Perdition

There’s a huge debate at the moment in Italy about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the legal proceedings against him.

Not sure how the story will end, though I really wish Italy could get rid of him and find a new life at the end of the dark tunnel in which the corrupted dwarf of the galaxies threw us all in.

That said I would also love to see a political drama being written about the whole situation. Well, probably Berlusconi would sue its author like he did with anybody else who dared confronting him, but it would be educational to see the whole situation on a theatre stage and I guess it would also help Italians confronting their demons.

I love political and court room dramas. Costumes may not be so important in such pieces, but I love the clean and linear style in which they are written and the background research that authors go through to write them.

Among my favourite court drama there is Perdition (1987), a text written by socialist playwright and scriptwriter Jim Allen (1926-1999) better known for being the author of the screenplay for the films Hidden Agenda, Raining Stones and Land and Freedom, directed by Ken Loach. 

Originally, the play was written for The Royal Court Theatre in London and was in the final stages of rehearsal - with Gabriel Byrne in the lead role and with direction by Ken Loach - when accusations by leading British Zionists about the play being anti-Semitic, unnerved the Royal Court’s Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark who decided to axe it. The ban at the Royal Court wasn’t the only one the play received: the Zionist lobby ensured that no theatre would stage the play in London or anywhere else.

Defined by The Guardian in 1999 as “the most controversial play of the 1980s”, Perdition is about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War. The play is based on a libel trial that took place in Israel during the 1950s and centres on the head of the Zionist Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kasztner, who sued a pamphleteer for claiming that he helped the Nazis exterminate 500,000 of his own people in Hungary in 1944-45, after admitting to negotiating with the SS war criminal Adolph Eichmann for the safe passage out of Hungary of just 2,000 Jews, many of whom were Zionists from his home town in Hungary. According to the play, a number of Jews was allowed to escape to Palestine in return for silence about the destination of those bound for the concentration camps.

The main reason of the controversy that surrounded the play is that it showed how some of the leaders of the Zionist movement in occupied Europe collaborated with the Nazis. Accused of distorting historical facts and of having produced an anti-Semitic play, Allen found himself banned from the British and Irish stages, but the real problem lied in the fact that, though the play was accused of being historically inaccurate, evidence proves that what Allen recounts in his play, really happened.

Those who have been lucky enough throughout the years to see staged readings of Perdition or to read the play in English, agree that Allen’s work is a powerful court room drama that makes you want to know more about the historical background of the play and about some of the main themes such as the dichotomy between the resistance to and the collaboration with the Nazis; Zionist ideology putting the priority of the Jewish state building in Palestine before the priority of rescue; the Israelis wanting a homeland at the expense of the Palestinians; the consequences the events recounted in the play had on the present government of Israel. Yet Perdition’s final message is highlighting how resistance and collaboration became two sides of the same coin in Europe under Nazi occupation.

In a letter to The Guardian written in 2004, Ken Loach remembered the words of writer Eric Fried, many of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, “I am envious I have not written (this play) myself,” Fried stated, “To accuse the play of faking history or anti-Jewish bias is monstrous. Perdition should be staged wherever possible.”

Though it's not so easy to stage Perdition in the UK, Allen’s work is there for people to read, question themselves and, possibly, find the historical truth that many politicians, historians and critics keep on denying. Who knows, maybe one day there will even be a proper court room drama about Berlusconi...

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