by Vanessa Redgrave’s Oscar acceptance speech remains an astonishing clock. It was in 1978 and the star had just collected the award of the best supporting actress for playing an anti-Nazi hero in Julia to Jane Fonda. After entering the stage in her swimming black dress, her golden statuette by John Travolta was presented to her.
The preliminary of the ceremony was affected by controversy and threats against redgrave because it had told and produced the Palestinian, a documentary that was seen by some of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization in the previous year. A portrait of Redgrave, then 41, was burned by Jewish activists outside the Dorothy Chandler pavilion in Los Angeles; Counter -protesters waved the Palestinian flag. The atmosphere was so that police stimuluses were placed on the roof of the theater to protect themselves against a potential assassin.
“You should be very proud that you have stood firmly in the past few weeks and have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small group of Zionist hoodlums, whose behavior is an insult to the Jews’ stature,” she said to Hollywood’s elite. Some booed. The actress later claimed that she referred to activists from the Jewish defense league, but many generally interpreted her speech as hostile to Israel. It has certainly damaged her career.
Redgraves outbreak was new at that time, but now, almost two years since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, which triggered the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza, the open propalestinic activism for the course in the acting arts is par.
In the past few weeks alone, we have seen the controversial Glastonbury sets of punk -rapper Bob Vylan – one whose members led the “death, death for the IDF” and has been on the “Zionist” recording industry – and kneecap, a group whose career has commissioned, according to a controversial statement about the testimony of active substances and palm trees and palm trees Palmestine. Both groups examined their services from the police. The examination of the appearance of knee caps Glastonbury was then fallen.
Even the Royal Opera House, the August Covent Garden Institution, has proven to be susceptible to crawling this activism on stage. The end of Verdi’s IL Trovatore was disturbed by a freelance actor, Daniel Perry, who developed the Palestinian flag and struggled away from a backstage figure that tried to remove it. A spokeswoman for the event location said: “The representation of the flag was a spontaneous and non -authorized action by the artist. It was not approved by the Royal Ballet and Opera and is not in line with our involvement for political impartiality.”
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The emergency of the Palestinians has been an obsession among the largely left figures in recent decades, which make up the leading figures in the performing arts. While Redgrave was a relatively fringed figure for her pronounced support for Palestine in the late 1970s – the Cold War and Apartheid in South Africa were the main sources of geopolitical fear in most years of the late 20th century – since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Nelson Mandela, much more attention to the Berlin wall.
Think of seven Jewish children, which in 2009 Caryl Churchill, which covers Israeli history in 10 minutes, which was divided a piece for Gaza. It was hastily written in response to Operation Cast Lead, the invasion of the Israeli military in the Palestinian territory, after the Hamas came to power. Up to 1,400 Gazans died during the three -week conflict, as did 13 Israelis.
Churchill published seven Jewish children at that time and said: “Israel has done many terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme.” The piece was widely condemned as anti -Semitic, an assertion that she always contested, and the BBC refused to adapt it for the radio because it is impartial.
The 86 -year -old Churchill also remains committed to the Palestinian thing. At the beginning of this year she gave up plans to organize a new piece in Donmar Warehouse because the Central London Theater is sponsored by Barclays Bank, which was accused of having connections to Israel. More than 300 art figures, including the actors Juliet Stevenson, Samuel West and Harriet Walter, signed an open letter in which Churchill’s decision was supported.
Disorders and boycotts are of course nothing new. Persistent audience disorders have derailed a performance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra 2011 at the BBC Proms so much that his broadcast in Radio 3 was interrupted twice. The following year, Mark Rylance was one of 37 people who signed a letter to the Guardian who required a performance by the Israeli theater society Habima in Shakespeare’s Globe to be canceled.
“The invitation of Habima combines the world’s globe with guidelines of exclusion, which is practiced by the Israeli state and approved by its National Theater Company,” said the letter. “We ask the globe to withdraw the invitation so that the festival is not involved in human rights violations and the illegal colonization of the occupied country.”
Globe bosses defended the program decision, but the performance of a Hebrew-speaking dealer from Venice was disturbed. About 15 people were carried out of the theater or led to develop banner and flags while a man was arrested.
For supporters of the Palestinian thing, the reason for the voice is a matter of course. I ask Juliet Stevenson why events in Gaza have encouraged you and her colleagues. “A simple answer to the question is that with 100,000 people killed and around 18,000 children among them, the reason why people feel strongly above the problem,” she says. “Killing a large number of innocent people in a terrible way – burning, shot, hunger, exploding with bombs – probably so many people are strong. Would you not think?”
For Perry in the Royal Opera House, the flag seems to be developing the risk of being worth committing what the Slipedisc journalist Norman calls Librecht as “suicide”. He tells me that it is unlikely that he will be booked again because “someone who disturbs the illusion of the theater” cannot trust “to appear on stage without importing his own problem”.
It is noteworthy that there is no such protest against phases across the country with all the noise about Palestine against what is happening in Ukraine or Sudan, two other long -term conflicts in which civilians are regularly killed. “The people who talk about Palestine never hear them about Russia, you never hear them in Sudan or one of the other atrocities in the world.
“It’s trendy. If all your friends do it and you want to keep them as your friends, then you will take part.”
Maureen Lipman, the Jewish actress, tells me that she believes that “the Jews, the Israelis, have transformed into the white South Africans under apartheid: bogeyms who must have against it.” These people believe with all my heart that the Palestinian thing is greater than anything in the world; Great than the Sudan or Yemen, larger than Burma, bigger than China, “says Lipman about the propalestine activists.” There is a cause as if there is one thing in South Africa and she really appeals to these people. “
It can feel like the problem of Palestine wherever they look in the arts. The entire Edinburgh -Fringe last year was dominated after ugly scenes in a set of the American comedian Reginald D Hunter when he hugged by an Israeli couple who took problems with one of his jokes and was canceled by other spectators. Regardless of this, Hunter appeared in court this month after he had been accused of writing anti-Semitic social media contributions.
In the meantime, musicians such as Brian Eno and Massive Attack have put together with a kneecap to create a syndicate for artists who are “threatened in silent or career can be threatened” by speaking through Palestine. Gary Lineker left his lucrative job at the BBC on the BBC’s conflict on the BBC due to his own social media.
Paul W Fleming, General Secretary The equity of the Performers Union, says that the pro-Palestinian activism only because of the ambiguous position of the British government with regard to the question of what is going on in the Middle East, in contrast to its clear attitude, for example, Ukraine, for example, is noticed in contrast to its clear attitude. In addition, many art bosses seem to be concerned about programming work that deals directly with the Israel Palestine conflict, e.g.
“The arts should be a space in which these injustices are challenged, and we understand the world a little better,” he says to me. “The reason why it feels so feverish is a predominant culture of the implicit and explicit censorship of Pro-Palestinian voices and a general fear in civil society that they are talking about it.
Fleming adds: “Likewise, the government does not listen to artists or normal citizens who want to say:” General is wrong, British complicity in this genocide is wrong, the complicity of large international companies in the systems of genocide and apartheid is wrong “, and nothing to change. And if people are not raised their voices.
After Redgrave left the Oscars stage in 1978, the Jewish writer Paddy Chayefsky presented script prices, however, before he did so, decided to treat the actress’s earlier comments. “I would like to say -of course personal opinion -that I use people sick and tired of people who take advantage of the Oscar awards for the spread of their own personal political propaganda,” he said. “I would like to suggest Ms. Redgrave that your winning of an Oscar is not a decisive moment in history, does not require a proclamation and that a simple thank you was sufficient.” He received standing ovation.
Many art lovers can repeat this feeling if they are confronted by political protests today.
