Seven Jewish Children: An Anti-Semitic Play Debuts in London

...The work consists of seven cryptic scenes in which parents, grandparents and relatives debate how much children should know and not know. It moves, implicitly, from the Holocaust to the foundation of the state of Israel through the sundry Middle East wars up to the invasion of Gaza. At first, the advice indicates the deep divisions within Israel ("Tell her they want to drive us into the sea" / "Tell her they don't"); at the end, it becomes a ruthless justification for self-preservation ("Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe").
Churchill, I'm sure, would not deny the existence of fierce external, and internal, Jewish opposition to the attack on Gaza. What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter. Avoiding overt didacticism, her play becomes a heartfelt lamentation for the future generations who will themselves become victims of the attempted military suppression of Hamas. Performed by nine actors, under Dominic Cooke's brisk, clear direction, the play solves nothing, but shows theatre's power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage...

Michael Billington, guardian.co.uk
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...Churchill’s unnamed characters talk of survival, identity, defiance and aggression. These aren’t conveyed as clunky Big Questions but as urgent domestic quandaries about how much to tell an unseen girl about the situation. From “Don’t tell her they’ll kill her” in the first scene to “Tell her we’re the iron fist now” in the final scene the fear remains, but the attitude hardens.
But Churchill is not just stating that victims can become aggressors. She shows people wrestling with whether to define themselves by their situation or by some broader notion of humanity. Wrestling with what innocence means. “Tell her there are still people who hate Jews,” says one character. “Tell her there are people who love Jews,” says another. “Don’t tell her to think Jews or not Jews,” says a third.
The writing is rhythmic and spare. There are no heroes or villains, for all that Churchill decries what is happening in Gaza. There is just the constant colliding of the two big, mutually exclusive truths of our lives: we’re just like everybody else, and we’re nothing like anybody else...

Dominic Maxwell, The Times
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...One press report quoted Churchill as saying: ’Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme.’
Given the bluntness of that remark, you might expect naked anger on stage. But ’Seven Jewish Children’ is marked by coolness, consistency and detachment.
That’s not to say that it feels even-handed. In fact, it’s manifestly one-sided, abstaining from imagining its way into the minds of Gaza civilians.
It mounts, quite plainly, a criticism of what Israel has become but it’s crafty – it presents that criticism as self-criticism, as a collective internal dialogue that wrestles with the need for honesty versus the value of propagandising deception.
Each of the seven scenes involves unspecified Jewish family members, gathering to work out the best thing to say to an unnamed girl-relation.
’Tell her it’s a game / Tell her it’s serious / But don’t frighten her’ – it begins, establishing a formula of simple, imperative statements, many of them instantly contradicted.
We deduce that the child in question is in hiding from the Nazis. How much information should she be armed with? Where to draw the line between protecting her and alarming her?
The pattern repeats itself, so the succeeding exchanges resemble a form of cultural DNA, mutating down the decades.
We get a discussion about the Holocaust, preparation for emigration to Israel, a debate about the existing Arab population, a resume of the Six-Day War, a summary of subsequent Palestinian-Israeli relations and, then we’re at the 2009 bombing of Gaza: 'Tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? Tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves.’
There you have it: total culpability, total denial...

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

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script (pdf)