‘I see it as payback for an anti-Semitic industry’: inside daring Jewish musical Cable Street
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In a rehearsal space under a railway arch in south-east London, a rag-tag mob is building a barricade out of old ladders and chairs. Actress Debbie Chazen’s Mrs Gertz is brandishing a kitchen utensil when she sees the ranks of police. “I’m gonna need a bigger rolling pin!” She quickly turns into one of the constables, just as Jez Unwin, in a Jewish prayer shawl, morphs into a Blackshirt.
“Guess it’s time to get involved! Irish and Jewish, black and white and young and old,” shouts Sha Dessi’s Mairaid. This is followed by chants of “The y-ds, the y-ds, we gotta get rid of the y-ds” and “Oy gevalt! The Cossacks are coming!”
It is a riot of colour and noise. In fact, it is a plain old riot: the 87-year-old Battle of Cable Street brought to life for a new musical, now on at the Southwark Playhouse. As the jackboot of authoritarianism was marching across Europe, Britain had its own demagogue, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, whose members regularly beat up Jews on the streets. On October 4 1936, Mosley wanted to parade straight through the Jewish East End in a brazen act of provocation. The denizens of east London – not just Jews, but Irish dockers, communists and trade unionists – united to stop him.
As many as 300,000 (estimates vary hugely) turned out to block the path of up to 5,000 Blackshirts in military formation. They ended up waging hand-to-hand combat with mounted police, who eventually persuaded Mosley to divert the march for fear of further bloodshed.
The battle formed the backdrop to Arnold Wesker’s 1958 state-of-the-nation play Chicken Soup with Barley, and was featured in a 2019 episode of EastEnders, showing the death of the show’s first Jewish character, Dr Legg. But something has entered the zeitgeist – also this week, Tracy-Ann Oberman’s Cable Street-set The Merchant of Venice 1936 transferred to the West End.
“It struck me as a really important story of the times that we’re living in,” says the composer and lyricist Tim Gilvin, who is descended from Irish Catholics who lived near Cable Street. “This is about people’s fear of the other being leveraged for political gain.” His “melting-pot score” includes genres ranging from rap and folk punk to Britpop and music hall. There are also Spanish melodies – a nod to the influence of the anti-fascists of the Spanish Civil War on the counter-demonstrators, who used “No pasarán”, or “They shall not pass”, as their slogan.
“I think history is repeating itself,” says the director Adam Lenson. “Cable Street is being interrogated as we are looking for how to meet this present moment.” Gilvin performed the first song, Only Words, at Lenson’s Signal series of concerts in 2018. That night, he was told by a mutual friend that the playwright Alex Kanefsky had been talking about writing a Cable Street musical. They joined forces and showcased another song at a pandemic-era Signal concert, broadcast online, which was seen by the producer Dylan Schlosberg, who commissioned the show.
Lenson is ready to take on anyone who is sceptical about musical theatre tackling such weighty history. “It’s been the project of my life to convince people that we need to stop underestimating musicals,” he says. “Musical theatre can be anything and everything. The fact it’s so rarely allowed to be is normally a commercial constraint in terms of what people think sells.”
Danny Colligan (Dirty Dancing), Sha Dessi (Les Misérables) and recent graduate Joshua Ginsberg play the three young leads – Ron, a northerner enlisted by the fascists, Mairaid, an Irish poet told by her mother that “a dream never did the dishes”, and Sammy, a former boxer struggling to get work because of anti-Semitism. It was only after being cast that Ginsberg discovered his great-grandfather Isidor Baum fought at Cable Street, returning home bleeding profusely.
The battle is a celebrated moment in my family’s history, too. My “Auntie Hannah” – my dad’s cousin, Hannah Grant – was an impassioned 15-year-old living at 183 Cable Street. I first interviewed her for a primary-school project in the mid-1990s, and then again for the 70th and 80th anniversaries, before her death in 2017, aged 96.
Outraged at the “bloody cheek” of the BUF, she leafleted door-to-door and went on the day with her brothers, disobeying the orders of their parents, Jewish leaders from the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle. While men ripped up paving stones and women emptied chamber pots from upstairs windows, Hannah took to the streets armed with marbles in her pocket: “As the police horses came along, you waited, to get them under.”
In 2006, I went with Hannah and two other veterans, Aubrey Morris and Ubby Cowan, back to Cable Street. I vividly remember Ubby telling me how he was pushed through a department-store window by police with “batons the size of broom handles” at Gardiner’s Corner, the main flashpoint. His brand-new sports jacket was cut to shreds. His grandson, Yoav Segal, is the musical’s set designer.
This is a proud chapter of British-Jewish history. It is also an illustrious event for the Left. Jeremy Corbyn has been much parodied for regularly harking back to 1936. When questioned in 2015 about his alleged links to a Holocaust denier, he replied: “My mother stood in Cable Street alongside the Jewish people and the Irish people. We all have a duty to oppose any kind of racism wherever it raises its head.”
Cable Street’s legacy includes the Public Order Act 1936, outlawing the public wearing of political uniforms and allowing police to ban or alter the routes of marches. But Gilvin – who left Mosley out of the show so as not to give him “too much oxygen” – is conscious of the danger of mythologising. “Our musical doesn’t finish with the Battle of Cable Street, because a week later, the East End experienced its worst night of anti-Semitic violence in decades [the “Pogrom of Mile End”], and membership of the BUF increased. It was a symbolic victory.”
Lenson, whose great-grandparents had a hat shop on Cable Street, has been an outspoken critic of Jewish erasure in the arts. He was at the forefront of “Falsettogate” – the 2019 row over a London staging of the musical Falsettos, which is about a Jewish family, but had no Jews in the cast or crew. “Jewface” began to enter the lexicon.
He also took on the Royal Court Theatre over its decision – despite warnings of the offence – to give a greedy billionaire the unmistakably Jewish name Hershel Fink in the 2021 play Rare Earth Mettle. “What I’ve been so thrilled at is that there are both Jews playing Jews and non-Jews playing Jews,” he says. “Making the show feels a little bit like karmic payback for some quite painful years of activism in an industry that I still think is unfortunately a bit anti-Semitic.”
He points to the fallacy “that Jews control or are, indeed, highly present in the British theatre scene” – he has heard racist comments said with abandon. “I once told someone I was doing a job in opera and the money was slightly better than in musical theatre, and they said, ‘Good Jewish boy, following the money.’” He says he has “definitely lost work by speaking out. After a while, people hear the tone of complaint louder than they hear the sound of the wrong.”
In November last year, 100,000 people marched through central London to protest against the post-October 7 upsurge in Jew hatred, in what was described as the largest demonstration of its kind since Cable Street. The trade unionists, communists and Corbynites were conspicuously absent.
I ask Lenson if he could see such disparate groups banding together again. “I would hope so,” he says. “One of the reasons that Cable Street is popular is because it comes with a little dose of idealism. So, yes, I’m an idealist and I would like to believe that when the real darkness comes, people know what’s right.”
‘Cable Street’ runs at The Large, Southwark Playhouse Borough, London SE1, until March 16
