JULIA PASCAL

JULIA PASCAL

London playwright and scholar produced in the UK, continental Europe and New York. Plays are published by Oberon Books, Faber, Samuel French (Inc). Writes plays that challenge moral and social consciences. She invites audiences to be provoked, challenged and amazed
Produced works include Three Sisters, Blueprint Medea, Broken English, A Dead Woman On Holiday, The Yiddish Queen Lear, St Joan,...
London playwright and scholar produced in the UK, continental Europe and New York. Plays are published by Oberon Books, Faber, Samuel French (Inc). Writes plays that challenge moral and social consciences. She invites audiences to be provoked, challenged and amazed
Produced works include Three Sisters, Blueprint Medea, Broken English, A Dead Woman On Holiday, The Yiddish Queen Lear, St Joan, Crossing Jerusalem, Honeypot, Year Zero, The Shylock Play, A Dead Woman On Holiday, Theresa, The Dybbuk, The Golem, Nineveh and the short play Revelations.
Unproduced works are The War Bride, The Soldier and the Doctor's Wife, Paradise Now, Tariq and Sarah, Broken English, 12-37, As Happy As God in France, The Road to Paradise (stage version).

For BBC Radio, Revelations, The Road To Paradise. For BBC TV, Charlotte & Jane based on Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre.

Plays explore politics, sex, violence.

PhD University of York. Awards include National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Teaches theatre for St Lawrence University's Study Abroad Program, London and for London's City University's Theatre Writing degree course.

Plays

  • 12-37
    Paul and Cecil Green are Dublin Jews whose Irish nationalism is transformed into Jewish nationalism as they travel from 1935 Dublin to 1946 Palesinte. Paul becomes involved with those who blow up the King David Hotel at 12-37 on 22 July 1946 and Cecil is accidentally killed in the blast. Both men are in love with Yiddish actor Rina Goldenberg whose life is changed after being a sex slave in Nazi concentration...
    Paul and Cecil Green are Dublin Jews whose Irish nationalism is transformed into Jewish nationalism as they travel from 1935 Dublin to 1946 Palesinte. Paul becomes involved with those who blow up the King David Hotel at 12-37 on 22 July 1946 and Cecil is accidentally killed in the blast. Both men are in love with Yiddish actor Rina Goldenberg whose life is changed after being a sex slave in Nazi concentration camps. She too becomes a Right Wing Jewish nationalist and exchanges the dream of international socialism to struggle for a homeland for Jews.
  • AS HAPPY AS GOD IN FRANCE
    May 1940. Paris. Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon and Eva Daube are arrested as 'Undesirables'. The play explores their journey to the camp of Gurs in South West France and their escape from French captivity towards freedom and death.
  • A MANCHESTER GIRLHOOD
    60-75 MINUTES minutes One act play.
    Three daughters of Romanian Jews grow up in Manchester between two world wars. The play explores their loves, passions, identities and position in the world as they enter three different lives. Isabel dreams of being an artist and diverts her ambitions to becoming a doctor's wife. Edith joins the army and is a munitions officer.
    Pearl is a war bride who...
    60-75 MINUTES minutes One act play.
    Three daughters of Romanian Jews grow up in Manchester between two world wars. The play explores their loves, passions, identities and position in the world as they enter three different lives. Isabel dreams of being an artist and diverts her ambitions to becoming a doctor's wife. Edith joins the army and is a munitions officer.
    Pearl is a war bride who finds that life in Louisiana is quite different from what she knew in Lancashire. A modern history told through the lives of women who have been silenced but whose experiences challenge ideals of 'femininity', work and motherhood.
    The text is written to be staged as a European theatre piece using movement, music, cabaret and vaudeville styles. Zoom is possible with this play.
  • BLUEPRINT MEDEA
    Full length play. 90 minutes. Medea, a Kurdish soldier from Turkey arrives in London as an illegal immigrant. She has two children with Jason-Mohammed the son of a London Iraqi. When Jason is forced to abandon Medea for his cousin Glauke, Medea seeks revenge.
  • WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE
    One act 75 minutes.
    A 50 year old London journalist, Judith Green, goes to Manhattan for a job. There she meets a series of people, including her 110 year old great aunt, who push her on a course which leads her to the Brooklyn Bridge. Will she jump off it?
  • NINEVEH
    One act 90 minute studio play. Four former soldiers wake up in an unknown place. They don't know how they got there. Only by revealing their own savagery can they hope to get out. The play explores post-traumatic stress syndrome through the journey of each character.
    In order to seek redemption they must admit their pasts and also be strong enough to face the hostile new world outside.
    ...
    One act 90 minute studio play. Four former soldiers wake up in an unknown place. They don't know how they got there. Only by revealing their own savagery can they hope to get out. The play explores post-traumatic stress syndrome through the journey of each character.
    In order to seek redemption they must admit their pasts and also be strong enough to face the hostile new world outside.

    This is a black-box, studio piece. It is actually taking part in a whale's belly and is a take on the Jonah story. Nineveh has movement and plenty of scope for adventurous production on a small budget. The four roles are huge. One is the leader, the other - an eternal student, the third is the joker and the fourth is an African child who has been forced to be a soldier. The text is based on real testimony from former combatants. In this play we don't know where we are or where the solders were fighting. There is dark humour. It is a one act, full lengther playing at 75 minutes without an intermission.
  • CROSSING JERUSALEM A full length play set in Jerusalem 2002
    YOU KNOW OUR PROBLEM?
    TOO MUCH HISTORY. NOT ENOUGH GEOGRAPHY.

    Crossing Jerusalem describes 24 hours in the life of an Israeli family in March 2002, as they cross Jerusalem at the beginning of the latest intifada. Over this 24 hours, personal and political history burst into the present. A complex family drama explodes in the most politically tense city in the world.
  • THE ROAD TO PARADISE
    Hidden British war history. The play focuses on the true story of Viennese Jewish music student Theresia Steiner. She left Austria to work as a nanny in London. The English family feared German bombing and moved to Guernsey. Theresa (anglicised version of her name) was arrested as an enemy alien in Guernsey as the Nazis invaded. Through the collaboration of the British authorities, she was betrayed and...
    Hidden British war history. The play focuses on the true story of Viennese Jewish music student Theresia Steiner. She left Austria to work as a nanny in London. The English family feared German bombing and moved to Guernsey. Theresa (anglicised version of her name) was arrested as an enemy alien in Guernsey as the Nazis invaded. Through the collaboration of the British authorities, she was betrayed and deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered. The play explores her experience and also looks a fictionalised love story between her and an Irish doctor on the Island.
  • THERESA
    90 minute, one act

    Hidden story of how the British authorities on the Channel Islands collaborated with the Nazis in WW2.

    An experimental dance theatre work on the life of Theresia Steiner, an Austrian Jew, deported from Guernsey to Auschwitz. 5-25 in cast. Depends on production.

    It has been seen in the UK, France and Germany between 1990 and 2003 intermittently....
    90 minute, one act

    Hidden story of how the British authorities on the Channel Islands collaborated with the Nazis in WW2.

    An experimental dance theatre work on the life of Theresia Steiner, an Austrian Jew, deported from Guernsey to Auschwitz. 5-25 in cast. Depends on production.

    It has been seen in the UK, France and Germany between 1990 and 2003 intermittently. It has not had a US professional production.
  • THE DYBBUK
    A modern adaptation of Anski's classic set in a ghetto in 1942. Judith goes to Germany and finds it full of ghosts. She dreams of a ghetto where five secular Jews remember the myth of The Dybbuk. She tries to help the inmates learn the culture and history that are part of this myth in order to keep them engaged in the last moments of the their life. This is a text that has scope for European performance...
    A modern adaptation of Anski's classic set in a ghetto in 1942. Judith goes to Germany and finds it full of ghosts. She dreams of a ghetto where five secular Jews remember the myth of The Dybbuk. She tries to help the inmates learn the culture and history that are part of this myth in order to keep them engaged in the last moments of the their life. This is a text that has scope for European performance techniques. It has been very successful in its European showings and at the Theatre for the New City in Manhattan.
  • WOMAN IN THE MOON
    One act 90 minute play.
    An exploration in to the life of Wernher von Braun as American hero with the past of a Nazi scientist. The play connects the enslavement of young men in Camp Dora forced to work on the Nazi Rocket program and the relationship this has to the 1969 American Moon Landing.
  • A DEAD WOMAN ON HOLIDAY. Zoom play.
    One act play, 90 minutes.
    Set in the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 the drama focuses on the experience of French Jewish interpreter Sophia Goldenberg. It explores what happens to those who have to transmit Shoah experience and the effect it has on their lives. It also looks at America in postwar Germany. This is a love story between two people whose war attracts them and drives them apart.
  • PARADISE NOW
    A London worker, who is part of the Crossrail digging project, unearths Joan England who has been hidden in the ground since 1290. She is an English Jew who refused to leave England when deportation or death was the order. Concealing herself as a Catholic, and later a Protestant, she time travels back to 1656 and meets the rabbi who tries to convince Oliver Cromwell to allow Jewish return. When it fails she...
    A London worker, who is part of the Crossrail digging project, unearths Joan England who has been hidden in the ground since 1290. She is an English Jew who refused to leave England when deportation or death was the order. Concealing herself as a Catholic, and later a Protestant, she time travels back to 1656 and meets the rabbi who tries to convince Oliver Cromwell to allow Jewish return. When it fails she shoots forward to modern Israel where she meets the biblical Sarah. Joan, who has become an evangelical Christian, wants to baptise Sarah to help the conversion of the Jews and the impending Apocalypse. She succeeds and thereby seemingly hastens the end of the world. The play is a satire on English history and religious fervour.
  • BROKEN ENGLISH
    London 1946. A small room in the East End. A group of Jews are plotting to assassinate the Foreign Secretary as a way of publicising his limitation of Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine.
  • HONEYPOT
    Susanne, a Swedish woman, discovers that she is a Jew after her father's death. This sends her on a mission to Israel where she becomes a Mossad agent and is part of Operation Vengeance which was an assassination of those who murdered the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. The problem is her potential victim falls in love with her. Is she able to murder him?
  • CHERCHEZ LA FEMME a short play.
    A woman's final frozen embryo has failed to come to term. She is in despair until she talks to her women friends about love, sex, children and a new way of mothering. ZOOM PLAY
  • GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
    An elderly Polish Jew sleeps rough on the London street. She is approached by a young woman who wants to interview her for a writing project. As they talk the Queen of England passes by to open a new building. The play satirises the English class system today while connecting two women of different ethnicities and ages in a brutal moment of recognition.
  • THE GOLEM
    A play for young people based on the legend. A group is terrorised by outsiders. The rabbi decides to make a man of mud, a golem, to defend his people. The golem becomes the community warrior and all goes well until he become violent and has to be dismantled.
  • OLD NEWLAND
    An old Dublin Jewish doctor is in a London hospital bed. He is tended to by an Indian nurse who reminds him of his World War Two posting in India during World War Two. Floating through memory he relives the major issues of the twentieth century: nationalism, war, Shoah, Zionism, anti-Zionism and memories of frustrated love.
  • ANTIGONE Zoom Play. MONOLOGUE OR TWO HANDER.
    A 50 year old woman police officer, of Greek Cypriot origin, brought up in London interrogates the man who has murdered her fiancé in a terrorist attack. She needs to get him to give her the names of his accomplices in order to stop a bombing network. She also needs to defeat his spirit in order to gain the power to bury the man she lives. The 30 minute drama uses both naturalism and flashbacks as a technique.
  • L'ANNEE ZERO-YEAR ZERO
    Paying homage to Joan Littlewood's Oh What A Lovely War!Year Zero examines a small town in the north of France during the French occupation of 1940-1944. Researched from witness and testimony in Maubeuge the script explores Communism, collaboration, fascism, antisemitism and survival. There are French and English versions.
  • ST JOAN
    Black Jewish Londoner Joan Rabinowitch imagines herself time travelling in the past to try and stop slavery and Shoah. This is an experimental and sometimes poetic work for three or more performers. It explores history, slavery, patriarchy, French culture and theatre.
  • NOBODY'S PERFECT An anti-romantic comedy
    Janey Goldberg is a 33 year old London designer at the top of her profession. She is a tiny bit of Zandra Rhodes, a tiny bit of Stella McCartney and could almost be the Jewish granddaughter of Vivienne Westwood. But she is Janey Goldberg- happily unmarried and intending to stay single. However she becomes caught up in her parents' drama. She must help her Casanova father reconcile with her betrayed mother...
    Janey Goldberg is a 33 year old London designer at the top of her profession. She is a tiny bit of Zandra Rhodes, a tiny bit of Stella McCartney and could almost be the Jewish granddaughter of Vivienne Westwood. But she is Janey Goldberg- happily unmarried and intending to stay single. However she becomes caught up in her parents' drama. She must help her Casanova father reconcile with her betrayed mother while dodging their pressure to push her into the Jewish marriage market. This anti-romantic comedy examines love, libido and asks if erotic passion is a curse or a triumph.
  • STRANGER AT THE TABLE
    Pandora, a 15 year old London schoolgirl is teased for her frizzy hair. It concerns her that she does not look like everyone else. Her history teacher sets her a project which takes her on a wild journey of exploration in to a secret English narrative that illuminates why she has an appearance that is different. She hurtles back to 1656 where she meets Oliver Cromwell who wants the Jews to return to England and...
    Pandora, a 15 year old London schoolgirl is teased for her frizzy hair. It concerns her that she does not look like everyone else. Her history teacher sets her a project which takes her on a wild journey of exploration in to a secret English narrative that illuminates why she has an appearance that is different. She hurtles back to 1656 where she meets Oliver Cromwell who wants the Jews to return to England and others who do not.
    This could work as a zoom play.
  • AMSTERDAM Short play. Zoom.
    Dani Mountford meets Anne Frank in Amsterdam today. A man is following Dani and she can't shake him off. Can Anne Frank help?
  • ON THE SEVENTH DAY a monologue. This can be a zoom play.
    A 70 year old Jewish woman who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto as a child takese a journey on the London underground on the 7th of July 2005. This monologue takes her back into time and explores her humor, sexuality and poignant past just as London explodes.
  • I CAN'T BREATHE -Joan of Arc. A monologue. Can be a zoom play.
    JOAN RABINOWITCH IS A BLACK JEW WHO GETS CAUGHT UP IN THE MAY DAY RALLY ORGANISED BY FRENCH RACISTS WHO PUSHED AN AFRICAN IN TO THE SEINE. IN THIS VERSION SHE SEES THE STATUE OF JOAN OF ARC AROUND WHICH THE RACISTS RIDE ON HORSES. SHE BECOMES THE STATUE AS IT MELTS AND SAVES THE MAN.
  • THE STRONGER- a monologue or two hander
    Zoom play. Woman in her early seventies meets her husband's girlfriend. The play is inspired by Strindberg's play The Stronger. Monologue or two hander with one character silent.
  • CHANCE
    Monologue.
    A former African child soldier remembers being forced to kill his parents. Zoom play.
  • MISS CARRIAGE
    When a woman visits her shrink, she reveals some startling truths about marriage, motherhood and lust.
  • THE CORPSE GAME - a monologue.
    Monologue. Zoom. Freddy is a prisoner in Camp Dora which was used to construct the V2 bombers.
    He is telling the audience how he keeps his muscles with gymnastics using the body weight of corpses.

    This is an extract from the full length play Woman In The Moon.
  • BABYTRASH
    Monologue for a woman student who sells her body to pay her university fees.This would work on zoom.
  • THE CARETAKER a monologue-zoom play
    A woman explains to her husband about a moment in her life when she was sexually abused.
  • BEFORE THE KISS
    Short Noir play.

    In Northern France a daughter in law confronts her bedridden mother in law about infidelity, betrayal and death.
  • ESTHER & DEBORAH
    Short play. A grandmother and her granddaughter explore identity, Israel, revolution, belonging and making trouble. Zoom play.
  • ZOOM Monologue-Irena Walks
    A Polish Jew has been in hiding underground a rabbit hutch. She goes out to get the air as she can no longer bear being in the dark in a confined space. On the street, she is followed by a Jew-catcher working for the Nazis. He trails her with the window wound down so that she can hear him singing Hatikvah. She knows that if she turns round it reveals her recognition of this Hebrew song and will lead to her...
    A Polish Jew has been in hiding underground a rabbit hutch. She goes out to get the air as she can no longer bear being in the dark in a confined space. On the street, she is followed by a Jew-catcher working for the Nazis. He trails her with the window wound down so that she can hear him singing Hatikvah. She knows that if she turns round it reveals her recognition of this Hebrew song and will lead to her being seized. She has to struggle to ignore him. He passes. She continues walking. Another man is following her. Will he denounce her as a Jew? Has he recognised her as a Jew? She turns round to confront him. He has his penis in his hand. She laughs with relief. This is only a sexual confrontation and therefore she knows she will live.

    This monologue is lifted from the play Woman In The Moon and works as a stand-alone text.
  • CHERCHEZ LA FEMME
    Six women of many ages and ethnicities discuss sex, love and fertility. One has has an embryo frozen that has not come to term and she wants to explore how to have a child without a man.
  • THE QUEEN'S BODY
    London 1591, plagues is ravaging the city. A widow in Holborn, Jane Allington
    lets a room to Queen Elizabeth’s physician, Dr Lopez. They become lovers.
    She has his baby while he tries to survive the intrigue of an Elizabethan England that hates his rise and hates Jews.

    This is based on a true history.
  • TARIQ AND SARAH

    Tariq Iqbal is a 15- year old Rochdale schoolboy. His father has left his mother for a white English woman. He has formed a new family and abandoned his first one.
    This leaves Tariq and his sister Naveed confused and disturbed. Tariq falls in love with his 34- year old schoolteacher Sarah Michaels. She is bemused but is aware that boyish infatuation is a phase.

    Tariq becomes aware...

    Tariq Iqbal is a 15- year old Rochdale schoolboy. His father has left his mother for a white English woman. He has formed a new family and abandoned his first one.
    This leaves Tariq and his sister Naveed confused and disturbed. Tariq falls in love with his 34- year old schoolteacher Sarah Michaels. She is bemused but is aware that boyish infatuation is a phase.

    Tariq becomes aware that Naveed is selling sex for financial independence. Sarah tries to help her former pupil but Naveed is also emotionally damaged by her father’s behaviour. Brother and sister search for an answer to their distress. Tariq becomes obsessed with Sarah. Sarah appears to be in control of her work and emotional life but Tariq touches her vulnerable situation as a woman escaping a broken marriage. She and Tariq become lovers. However, Tariq has a rival for Sarah’s affections. This is his classmate Johnny Gisenga, son of Zairean refugees and evangelical Christians. Johnny, and his parents risk deportation under the government’s crack-down on illegal immigrants. In the Pentecostal Church, Johnny declares his love of Sarah to his congregation. He reveals the affair between Sarah and Tariq. Sarah is dismissed from her job and leaves Rochdale for Manchester.

    Five years later, Tariq and Johnny have become taxi drivers in Manchester. Still obsessed with Sarah, Tariq approaches her and tells her he wants her. Sarah rejects him. He becomes confused and violent. Naveed has returned to Islam and Tariq decides that the only way he can become the man of the house is to marry his cousin. In this way he believes that he can prove to be a good example of manhood and family responsibility. He wants to be the man his father is not.


  • Joining Up
    When war is declared Edith Jacobs goes to the recruiting office to join. Instead of being welcomed as a soldier, she is threatened with imprisonment as the daughter of enemy aliens. Edith is a fighter, not only of the Nazis but of a British government that wants to marginalise her as daughter of the enemy.
  • MISS CARRIAGE
    SUE a 50 year old woman sees her psychiatrist who is trying to get her off anti-depressants. The reason she is on them is rage at her husband for not allowing her to have a third child. During her session Sue esposes a migrant history of trauma and death which reveals her real reasons for taking medication.
  • THE CLEAN AIR SHOW
    A 10 minute play for children and young people about the environment, pollution and health.