BEADLE’S ABOUT!

He may be one of London’s busiest writer-directors. But Rikki Beadle-Blair still found time to talk to David McGillivray about his new play, Shalom Baby, which brings together black, gay and Jewish people at the start of the Holocaust…

Have I torn you away from rehearsals?

No, it’s a break. Don’t worry.

Are you writing and directing as usual?

I am, yes, and doing the design as well.

This is ridiculous. Is there nobody else who can help you out?

There is. But, you know, it’s like you mix your paints and then you do the painting. I don’t like somebody else to mix paints for me.

I’ve just done a series for QX on the history of gay theatre in which I think I described you as prolific.

Yes, some would call me prolific, some would say viral.

Well, both words are understatements. How’s it possible to do as much as you do? Hardly a month goes by without a new Rikki Beadle-Blair play.

Well, I like to stay busy.

Do you have no social life?

Heh-heh! Yeah, I do. I hang out. I’ve got lots of friends. I make them come and do the work with me. So that’s how I socialise.

How long does it take you to write a play?

Well, generally a play takes about a month to write. But this one’s taken much longer because I’ve had to really study the subject matter and do lots of research. It takes in so many different histories. It’s been a crash course in everything from the Weimar Republic to Jewish and black history.

What inspired the story?

I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington ten years ago. It’s an incredible museum but I asked about books about black people in the Holocaust and they didn’t have any. We’re not telling our stories. And I wanted to do a play that did that. So finally, almost ten years to the day, I’m doing my play which places black people and gay people and gypsies in the Holocaust alongside Jewish people. I really wanted to do it in a way that was funny and life-affirming and entertaining. I didn’t want to do Sophie’s Choice. It was a massive challenge.

We’re told that everyone got together in Weimar Berlin – black and white, gay and straight. Is that what you found during your research?

It is what I found but I didn’t focus on that. I focussed on a small family who live in the suburbs. The oldest son has experience of the night life but otherwise they’re not living that divine decadence life-style at all. They’re a relatively liberal family but they’re not Sally Bowles. They hire a Shabbes Goy [non-Jew who performs tasks religious Jews are not permitted on the Sabbath]. They get a black guy to do it and he falls in love with their daughter. Then there’s all this stuff going on with the gay son and all this…

Hang on. Tell us about the gay son…

One of the sons is gay and he has a relationship with an Aryan youth, who eventually gets sucked into the Nazi party. And this is juxtaposed with a modern story in New York and we see the difference between being gay then and being gay now, relationships then and now. Now we seem to have enormous amounts of freedom but do we really?

How do you manage to find comedy in the Holocaust?

Well, the characters are gay and black and Jewish so there’s that gallows humour we all use as a survival technique. Also I found that even in the concentration camps there was humour about how to survive in amidst the pain of it all. The modern Jewish family is very funny. They’ve all got issues and problems and they’re very loud about them!

 

• Shalom Baby is at the Theatre Royal, Theatre Square, Stratford, E15 from 20th October to 19th November. Box-office: 020 8534 0310 or www.stratfordeast.com 

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