Ahead of her new play Honeypot, premièring at New Diorama Theatre, Naima Khan talks to Julia Pascal about Europe's hand in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Mossad's use of women following the 1972 Olypmic killings in Munich.
Sport has always been tied to identity, as a nations' athletes come to embody that very nation. Their greatness is shared by a people and their deaths are mourned by thousands. The athletic setting of the 1972 Munich Olympic killings added to the global shock that met the news. The secretive aftermath of these killings forms the basis of Julia Pascal's new play Honeypot.
“Munich had a lot of resonance,” she tells me as she sips coffee in a high ceilinged room at the New York University building. “It was twenty-seven years after the end of the war. All those Jews had been murdered, Israel and Germany were setting up a friendship to try and regularise things. But then the German police were so lax, and the games started up again the next day.”
Steering its image away from the propaganda-rife Berlin Olympics of 1936, the German authorities and the Olympic planning committee moved towards a more open atmosphere for Munich. Perhaps they underestimated how the European actions after the war were (and to an extent still are) regarded in the Palestinian/Israeli territory.
It's something Julia takes a strong stance on: “I feel like the things going on in Israel are a European problem,” she says, “that the Palestinians are paying for what happened in Europe in the late forties. And it's the revenge cycle that interests me because in looking at that cycle, you can see both points of view.”
This comment leads our conversation down a maze of warrens where we're challenged by the difference between an Israeli and a Jew. “The Israeli is a 20th century construct,” she insists, “a warrior, a solider born from the ashes of the Jew, who is often considered the thinker, the moralist, the student, the quiet pacifist.”
In her 2002 play Crossing Jerusalem, Pascal addresses these multiple identities, the wider geography and the political hands that have played a part in the construction of the Israeli and Palestinian persona. But Honeypot, soon to run at New Diorama Theatre, looks at the impact of this fractured identity on one woman, ten years after the killings, as the revenge cycle wages on into a new decade.
“Susanne is one of these conventionally beautiful women,” she says describing her main character: “blonde, leggy and all too aware of her power over men. She is raised a Swedish Christian by her father who was in fact a hidden Jew. He came to Sweden as a child after his family were killed in Treblinka and when Susanne discovers this, she finds a whole new unexplored identity which leads her to Israel to join Mossad, to use her intelligence and her body as a honeypot.”
In choosing a female central character (based on a real woman Julia befriended in the late '80s), and structuring her history and personal life so thoughtfully, Pascal gets to dwell on many of the issues that surround the power of the honeypot. “Her search for an identity, and her overt sexuality, are used as a weapon and a drug. She is fractured and disturbed, but she also challenges all the stereotypes surrounding women – as a mother, as a daughter.” Though outwardly she addresses a war fought on many fronts, Susanne's journey also relates to an ongoing internal conflict that rings true for anyone concerned with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Honeypot runs at New Diorama Theatre from 12-30th October.
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