Where do you get your ideas?

I am excited to welcome playwright, theatre director and journalist Julia Pascal to the blog today to answer a question that every writer gets asked.

Where do you get your ideas?

By Julia Pascal

Where do you get your ideas?

That is the question I hear most frequently when I say I write plays.

I am 15. The place is a library in South London. I see a man in a dog-collar so I assume he will know the answer to my question.

Can you tell me about the end of the world?

He looks at me with alarm and then, with a broad Irish accent replies, ah don’t worry about it.

He saw an anxious adolescent who was in fear of apocalypse but it was a genuine fascination for Christian eschatology. I am a secular Jew and am not obsessed with fantasies of the world’s end but I have always been intrigued by the way this has inspired other artists. Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgment triptych can hold my gaze for hours.

In 2013 I spent time in Pennsylvania with hundreds of evangelical Christians who believe the Bible literally and who live their lives in the hope of the Second Coming. I grew up in a Christian England that did not like Jews and meeting all these men and women who told me they loved me was a surprise.

Part of the biblical narrative for the Second Coming is Jewish return to Israel.  To these Christians who were of a variety of denominations, I represented part of that plan even if 1) I do not live in Israel and 2) I don’t believe in Jesus as messiah and I am an atheist.  To them, my very presence is part of the larger plan.

Researching in English archives I also saw the links between  these evangelicals and the English Republic 1649-1660. During the Cromwellian  Protectorate Protestants discovered ‘the Hebrews’ while reading the Old Testament. At this point millennium fever was rife as the magical year of 1666 approached.

The problem was how was I to make these exciting elements into a cohesive play. I asked myself what is it that I really want to write about. The answer was that I needed to express a history that has been annihilated: Jewish life in England before it is widely acknowledged in the late nineteenth century. The symbiotic connections  between Judaism and Christianity needed dramatizing.

Also there was the question of form. I knew this could not be a naturalistic play, but what style would fit? I often find plot difficult until I have a central character. She appeared in my brain as Joan England, an English Jew who had hidden herself in a grave when Jews were deported in 1290. This woman would be a kind of Shakespearian Greasy Joan. Once I knew her voice and her personality, honest, raw and rude, I had the play’s action. Joan must be a modern woman. She is discovered by a Crossrail worker. Excavations are always revealing exciting histories here. Why not have a living history? A woman who never dies?

However I then had to plot in some background and I had no desire to write a history play. How could I bring Oliver Cromwell and the Dutch Rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, into the narrative without going into naturalism and historical drama. The answer was in Joan. She as a woman of the people, a time traveller, a kind of Jill of All Trades. She could conjure up Oliver Cromwell as a glove  puppet.  Peter Brook’s Rough Theatre was the way through such problems. I could have players and street theatre to give me the period, the craziness of Republican England and the religious fervor of the time.

The final section of the play takes Joan to modern Israel where she meets a hospital patient who turns out to be Sarah from Genesis. Joan decides to convert her. This is a coup as the conversion of the Jews is part of the prophecy that will hasten the Second Coming. The struggle between the two women is the final conflict that leads to the ultimate experience: The End Of The World. How was I to stage that?

Ideas come in the most unusual ways. I was in Paris at Christmas with my French husband. He asked me do you want to see the shop windows in Galeries Lafayette? Expecting a display of bling I was surprised to see vitrines of flying angels and characters who were manipulated by pulleys. All was computer-programmed but the mechanism reminded me of images of  flying devices in ballet, pantomime and popular theatre. I felt that this was the key for me.  This is how I would imagine the End Of The World. Simply and magically. As close to Bosch as I can make it.

The second draft is done and there are two new women characters of any age who are archetypes that offer huge roles for actors who can be of any age.

Taking on huge ideas and presenting them simply is what  pleases me in the work of Alfred Jarry, Bertolt Brecht and Joan Littlewood.  These are my writing parents and I acknowledge my debt to their wild creativity.

Back to the original question – where do these ideas come from?  I believe they are born in our 5 year old selves.

Julia Pascal is a playwright, theatre director and journalist. Her collection Political Plays is published by Oberon Books, London 2013. You can learn more about her at her website www.juliapascal.org.

Crossing Jerusalem is at the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center, Miami in February. The play has been voted one of the 10 best plays in the 2016 Jewish Playwriting Contest.