Julia Pascal

Jews returned to England in 1656 after the Whitehall Conference-right?

This cancelled the royal expulsion of Jews from England in 1290-right?

Wrong on both counts.

In December 1656, Oliver Cromwell called The Whitehall Conference to request Jewish return but few parliamentarians or merchants in Christian England wanted the Jews back.

Continue reading “The Whitehall Conference”

d 28 September 2021

It is with great sadness that we report the death of  Pascal Theatre Company’s former Financial Director Kate Barazetti. Kate served the company for many years, using her phenomenal skill with numbers to help an enterprise she supported – something she also did for City Limits magazine, the Africa Centre, International PEN, Space Studios and many others.

More than simply an accountant, she was a great humanitarian whose gift for friendship and hospitality spanned generational and social divides. She was fearless, forthright and funny, always finding ways to play the system and fight for the rights of those excluded or badly served by it. 

Having left school at 16, Kate learnt book-keeping at an early age. She finally completed her education by doing a degree and master’s in gender studies at London’s Birkbeck University in her fifties. She went on to set up the feminist news website Aviva from her front room. She later found her métier as a teacher, first teaching English to newly arrived refugees and then working on access to social science courses. She continued teaching – and working as an accountant – well into her seventies.

She is survived by two children, four grandchildren, her brother Nick, sister Annie, countless friends, former colleagues and grateful students. See more at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/01/kate-barazetti-obituary

Kate Barazetti, 8 September 1942-20 September 2021

By Alix Lee

What does Black History Month mean for you? Is it tokenism? 

I’m very interested in black history. I had a lot of questions. I’m Nigerian so everything I knew about being black was related to being Nigerian. The older I got the more people I was meeting who had similar stories but in different contexts. Black history month is the chance to learn all of these stories and how they connect and also I just love history and I just like to know how things developed, how we got here. So, I don’t think black history month is tokenism. It’s significant to look at how things change and where we are now. 

My interview with EA was really insightful. It was wonderful to learn about how her charity has positively impacted her community for years. I learned so much about the South Sudan Women’s Association and I look forward to hearing about their future projects.

I had a great conversation with actress Samantha Pearl, on a grey afternoon over the phone. The conversation flowed easily and was a wonderful chance to hear about the perspective of a black woman in the film and tv industry. I learned so much from her and I hope you enjoy our conversation. Thank you so much to Samantha for speaking to me, make sure you check out her latest appearance on Ghosts by BBC. 

In 2020, Pascal Theatre Company (PTC) put a call out to women whose lives, and mental and physical health had been disrupted by Covid and the enforced isolation of lockdown. Respondents were offered a platform to express their feelings, plus the opportunity to work with expert theatre and literary practitioners to explore and develop their ideas.

The result was the Giving Voice project (www.pascal-theatre.com/project/giving-voice), a digital archive featuring work by 38 women in written and recorded form.

Forward a year and the ever-resourceful Creative Director of PTC, Julia Pascal, found a way to extend the reach of the project – by collaborating with students from The London Contemporary Dance School at The Place Theatre and professional performers to create a promenade performance piece for the 2021 Bloomsbury Festival based on several of the Giving Voice submissions.

An immersive improvisation/rehearsal process explored the imaginative connections between dance, speech and memory, interweaving song, bodywork and cabaret-style performance to share the hidden stories brought to light by the project.

by HANNAH ARNAUD

Murdered 10 October 1943 at the age of 26.

Charlotte Salomon, born in 1917 Berlin to a Jewish family, is best known for Leben? Oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? Or Theatre?: A Song-Play). An early example of the graphic novel form, it is a series of images accompanied by text and music cues that tells a semi-fictionalised account of Salomon’s life. 

When Salomon was nine, her mother committed suicide. Charlotte was told that she had died from influenza. It wasn’t until 1938, when Salomon had been sent from Nazi Germany to live with her grandparents in the South of France, that her grandfather told her the truth.  She was also told about multiple other female members of the family who had killed themselves.

by Hannah Arnaud

Click onto the One Lost Stone website, a ‘digital travel guide’ to the history of Sephardi Jews in England, and you are brought to a collage of photographs suggesting a face.  Although the fragments share a colour palette, the image fractures. Its refusal to meld into one coherent picture is why collage is a particularly apt medium for the website’s aesthetic. It militates against the ‘melting pot’ philosophy which requires the immigrant to adopt the cultural norms of the host society. 

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Ags Irwin who was a great inspiration to the Company. At the end of her life, she generously contributed to our Giving Voice project, see more here.

We now wish to add a poem written during Covid, her bitter-sweet Lockdown Pie . She wrote it during the terrible year of confinement while undergoing treatment for cancer.

Ags never complained and she fought for every day of her life to be one of joy, humour and pleasure. She will be missed but we will always have her voice.

Lockdown Pie
By Ags Irwin
Read by Ruth Lass

Theatre is international and transgressive. With its roots in circus, Commedia dell’arte and carnival, it is vulgar and challenging. 

What was my first theatre? Punch and Judy fighting in a booth on a Lancashire beach? A small dance band where I sang Que Sera, Sera as a precocious ten-year-old? Dancing in the Blackpool Summer Dance Festival? Daring to play Cleopatra at 17 with the local boys’ school? 

Was it watching May Britt and Sammy Davis Jr in Blue Angel with my Romanian grandparents in a Manchester cinema? (That was the nearest they could get to the European theatre they had lost.)  

Was it during my drama school training, when we toured Twelfth Night to an international theatre festival? I still see the other students and my teenage self, sitting in a sports stadium in Sofia as the Czechs theatrically demonstrated against the Russian invasion…

This past year there has been no theatre. But the impulse to write drama is unstoppable. I have written two new plays and tidied up older ones. I have Zoomed and supported others, who did not know they could, to make theatre from their own lives, as part of our Giving Voice project. I am currently plotting new ways to make performance outside as we move away from the plague.

No virus can stop drama. It is the modus operandi of our politicians and our semi-feudal monarchy. We crave theatre, the show, the performance, the play. Only in English is it ‘the play’. In French, it is une pièce de théâtre; in German, ein Theaterstück: a theatre piece. But in the English language we play, and when the virus is dead, we shall play as we have never played before.

Julia Pascal, Artistic Director of Pascal Theatre Company