Though as soon as bracketed with Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, his fellow East Finish of London Jewish playwrights of the late Nineteen Fifties, Bernard Kops, who has died aged 97, was a extra fantastical, surreal author than both. And whereas Pinter was all the time a political author, Kops and Wesker, although dedicated socialists (and Kops a communist who offered copies of the Morning Star exterior Whitechapel station), provided extra sentimental portraits of Jewish household life within the context of native and European historical past.
Kops’s two early signature performs, which stay his finest identified – The Hamlet of Stepney Inexperienced (1957) and Enter Solly Gold (1961) – established his primary themes of emotional and materials escape from the humdrum life. This “enchancment” is invariably an phantasm as Kops celebrates the sturdiness of affection, advantage and belonging.
His Stepney Hamlet, David Levy, is keener to be a crooner than to run the household’s pickled herring stall, whereas his ghostly father, Sam – poisoned by household life, not a brother – revisits that life, finds all of it proper, and encourages his widow to marry his finest pal, Mr Segal. David finds happiness with Mr Segal’s daughter, Hava.
In scenes of rejoicing introduced on by a love potion, Hamlet has a contented ending. Thus, we will lastly reply the vexed educational query: does Hamlet sleep with Ophelia? Solely on tour, laddie – and within the Kops play. When it was revived for the primary time in London in 1987, critics discovered it humorous, absurdist and unjustly uncared for.
Solly Gold is a Tartuffe-like non secular conman who convinces a Jewish mogul that he’s the brand new Messiah with the intention to fleece him. This time, a shoe enterprise is perhaps up for grabs, and there may be some mordantly humorous satire of Jewish observances and domesticity. And one other completely happy ending.
The play was chosen to launch Wesker’s TUC-backed Centre 42 venture in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, as a part of a drive to current new performs in regional festivals. The try failed and the venture was recycled on the Roundhouse, north London, in 1966, however with out Kops’s play.
Kops remained marginal to the repertoire of the Nationwide, the West Finish, even the Royal Courtroom. However his output was nonetheless prolific, with a remaining rely of 4 dozen performs on radio, tv and in small theatres.
He made one thing of a comeback, definitely with the critics, within the 90s, with one other variation of disrupted household life and ritual, Enjoying Sinatra (1991, middle-aged Sinatra-loving siblings undone by a malevolent visitor) – “superbly written” mentioned Irving Wardle; and The Desires of Anne Frank (1992), which eclipsed the well-known play and movie of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in inserting Anne as an optimistic dreamer on the centre of her personal tragic story – “marvellous”, mentioned Michael Billington. The play stays typically carried out all around the world.
Kops was born in Stepney, east London, one among eight siblings – all of whom survived into their 90s. Each his father, Joel Kops, a tailor, and his mom, Jenny (nee Zetter), had been Dutch-Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Stepney Jewish main college and, he mentioned, “the college of the poor”, Whitechapel library, the place he learn voraciously and determined to turn out to be a author, sustaining himself as a docker, chef and barrow boy.
His breakthrough play – The Hamlet of Stepney Inexperienced – was a passport to the bohemian coterie of artists, writers and flaneurs in Soho, the place he ran a secondhand bookstall simply off Cambridge Circus with Erica Gordon, whom he had married in 1956. The novelist Colin MacInnes used Bernard and Erica as fashions for Mannie and Miriam Katz in Absolute Learners (1959). However after his second play, Goodbye World (1959), flopped on the Guildford Playhouse, Kops turned hooked on amphetamine, as he recounted in his autobiography, although his productiveness was unaffected, even perhaps enhanced.
The Dream of Peter Mann (1960) was an expressionist replace of Peer Gynt, the hero’s seek for uranium defied by his mom, within the form of an Angel of Demise, who shakes him again to life; this dramatic knife-edge in his work between residing and dying got here to a head in his personal manic behaviour and a botched try at taking hello personal life in 1975.
In the identical yr, his highly effective tv movie It’s a Beautiful Day Tomorrow alerted a brand new era to the 1943 Bethnal Inexperienced tube stairway catastrophe, when 173 folks, together with many ladies and kids, had been asphyxiated in a catastrophic crush beneath avenue stage throughout an air-raid warning, the worst civilian struggle catastrophe in Britain.
Kops kicked his drug behavior – he all the time gave Erica the credit score – and managed to discover a way of life with temper swings and depressions. He poured out novels and poems indefatigably whereas remaining jovial firm amongst mates and neighbours alongside the Finchley Street, West Hampstead. His different tv performs included The Boy Thinker (1974), primarily based on tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a boxing memorial, Ricky Marciano Is Lifeless (1976).
Ezra (1981) charted the incarceration by the US military of Ezra Pound in a cage in wartime Italy and drew a virtuoso efficiency of majestic madness from Ian McDiarmid on the New Half Moon alongside the Mile Finish Street. I used to be riveted, too, by one other wartime-related piece, Name on the Night time (1995), on the West Yorkshire Playhouse, through which a world well-known violinist, performed by Gary Waldhorn, returned to Leeds for a VE day celebration 50 years after he had first come to the town as a refugee. Once more, this was a play of reverie and replays, layered with outdated reminiscences and misplaced alternative.
Kops’s eighth quantity of poetry, The Room within the Daylight (2009), typically self-mocking, collected lots of his earlier poems, that are heartfelt and vivid slightly than metrically ingenious or opaque. He was a person of enormous coronary heart, often worn on his sleeve.
His tenth novel, The Odyssey of Samuel Glass (2012), reiterated that want to depart dwelling because the eponymous hero travels by means of time and house with a rabbi to Vitebsk (now in Belarus) the place he falls in together with his great-great-great-grandmother and a gang of pre-revolutionary anarchists. The escape, as common, was in truth a return.
He revealed two volumes of autobiography, The World is a Marriage ceremony (1964) and Shalom Bomb: Scenes from My Life (2000), through which most issues are defined, nothing hidden.
He’s survived by Erica, and by 4 kids, Adam, Hannah, Rebekah and Abigail.
