Jim Allen's Perdition passed off peacefully at the Gate on Friday: no demos, no angry walk-outs. Quite right too. The play, which argues that some Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis before and during the second world war and which was famously withdrawn by the Royal Court 48 hours before its first preview in 1987, deserves a fair hearing. That still, however, doesn't make it a good play.
Its form is that of a fictional trial taking place in the London High Court of Justice in 1967. Dr Yaron, a Hungarian gynaecologist, is bringing a case for libel against Ruth Kaplan, an Israeli Jew. She has published a pamphlet, I Accuse, which argues that Yaron and other members of the Central Jewish Council in Budapest in 1944 collaborated with Eichmann in sending half a million Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers.
She further alleges that certain Zionists were more concerned with the creation of a post-war Jewish state than with the rescue of individual lives. Yaron's basic defence is that, in the circumstances of war, cooperation was an enforced necessity and that, by bargaining with Eichmann, he and the Zionist Rescue Committee were able to save 18,000 Jews scheduled for deportation.
My first doubt concerns the play's form. Why give us fiction rather than established fact? Allen's play is based on a famous case that took place in Jerusalem in 1955: one in which the Israeli Advocate-General, on behalf of Dr Rudolph Kastner, sued a 71-year-old Hungarian Jew, Malkiel Greenwald, who had made identical charges to those brought in the play.
The trial judge endorsed all but one of Greenwald's accusations and Kastner himself was subsequently killed by ex-Irgun members. Then in 1957 the judge's verdict was reversed on appeal. Why doesn't Allen tell us this story, which is more dramatic than his own somewhat improbable fiction?
But, that aside, how does Perdition work as drama? My feeling is that it is an accusation masquerading as a trial. Yaron is certainly given the chance to put his case here articulated with moving dignity by Morris Perry. But the emotional weight of the piece clearly lies with the defendant played by the coolly glamorous Osnat Schmool.
Allen's play is certainly not anti-Semitic: it is permeated by a palpable horror at the Holocaust. Its weakness politically is that it treats Zionism as a monolithic force and dramatically, that it sets up Yaron in order to destroy him: clinching proof comes in the final scene when he emerges as a guilt-ridden figure craving "judgment".
Allen's play raises enormous issues: at what point, for instance, does pragmatic cooperation become collaboration? But it emerges more as a preconceived indictment than a piece of moral enquiry.
Elliot Levey's production, while perfectly watchable, adds to the faint air of unreality: this is a court where hardly anyone takes notes and counsel substitute eye-popping indignation for legal intervention.
The judicial enquiries staged by the Tricycle have lately shown us the devastating theatrical impact of fact: Allen's play, in contrast, has the loaded quality of an angry, partisan pamphlet.
• ***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
