Crossing Jerusalem & Other Plays by Julia Pascal

Author:Julia Pascal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781849438827
Publisher: Oberon Books
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

YEAR ZERO

to Ian Watts

Why I wrote Year Zero and St Joan

I was living in Maubeuge and the north of France over the 1990s. My husband was the Socialist Mayor of Maubeuge and I went with him to several memorial meetings held by former soldiers. Gradually, I became aware of the weight of experience of those who had been part of twentieth century French history. The occupation of France was still fresh in the memory of many. I interviewed those who had been collaborators, black marketeers, Communists, Gaullists and French women who had been children witnessing prostitutes and mothers getting their heads shaved for ‘horizontal collaboration’. Poignantly, the daughter of a collaborating policeman, murdered by the Resistance in 1944, begged me to remove from my play the incident which revealed her father’s treachery. The past pushed into the present and the production provoked feelings of unease in Maubeuge which preferred to forget its past.

St Joan was also inspired by the life I led in Maubeuge. I was frequently taken for an Algerian Arab and, when I said I was a Jew, direct antisemitism was expressed. At this time I learnt that Joan of Arc was the icon of the extreme Right in France and I felt moved to write an alternative modern Joan to give voice to those ‘outsiders’ in French society. My Joan is a modern Jewish Black woman who satirises notions of national purity. The play provoked fury from neo-Nazis in London and Paris and I received death threats on the web and by telephone. In Paris the theatre filled with the very people who rarely go to the theatre. The Blacks, the Arabs, the youth who find theatre has nothing to say to them. I was told ‘no French person would dare write this’.

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