AR: Yeah, I think it is the case. I also think that Chekhov had the same problem. [I know] I’m putting us in the best company… Three of the dramatists, Ryan Craig, Amy Rosenthal and Alexis Zegerman spoke to me about the show and their contributions. In the following conversation we discuss how being Jewish in Britain is a subject which is rarely reflected on the British stage, and the challenges that go with being Jewish playwrights. AZ: Do you guys think the way we write, which I think has a lot of commonality, gets misunderstood by the [theatre] establishment? It is heavy and it makes your clothes, hair and skin dirty,” says Craig whose new, partly autobiographical play Filthy Business stars Sara Kestelman as a first-generation Jewish immigrant Yetta Solomon who battles to keep the family concern going across three generations. AR: He [Chekhov] knew that if the audience laughed, they got the sadness and the anger. It’s the laugh that is the “tell” I think. If an audience aren’t finding it funny then I don’t think they are getting any of it.

As an alternative, in an extremely unlikely turn of events given his obnoxious character which is made obvious at an initial meeting, Martha becomes the flatmate of Billy Postlethwaite’s Darren aka Wham. He is medallion man personified, using bullying self-esteem to find sex partners. Strangely, he also displays unlikely weakness as soon as anyone challenges the almost comedic surface bravado. For all the play’s polemics against shutting down debate on campus, Charlotte and Theodore also explores why such decisions might be taken for well-intentioned reasons. “In drama, you can never take an absolute position – people are living in liminal spaces between what is right and wrong,” said Mr Craig. “It feels more prescient than when I wrote it two years ago, but these issues are complicated, so having an equally – if not more – brilliant philosopher put the other side is a good way to approach this.” In achieving his goals, Craig covers broad themes of finding and utilising ideas, the elements that must be put together to make up a story, the authorial voice and finishes with a chapter on where theatre might be going when we eventually escaped the ravages of coronavirus.

The actors perform commendably under the direction of Anthony Banks, especially given that on opening night a technical hitch stopped the show within 15 seconds of the lights coming up. It’s always been hard for an unknown writer to get a play read. It can take months to get a response to an unsolicited script. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about produced playwrights with serious CVs and professional profiles, who are actively encouraged, invested in and commissioned to write new plays for Arts Council-funded theatres, being messed around then ghosted. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation online ahead of the show. We join them as Ryan Craig promises that, despite the serious nature of the subjects, the Kiln evening will be funny. Seeming like rather an afterthought, possibly included at the suggestion of an editor or a publisher, there are also a handful of exercises for budding playwrights sprinkled through the volume. Instead, she gets advice from bland, occasionally blustering Logan, an old English-accented friend from schooldays, played by Calum Callaghan. The fact that they seem to love each other is somehow never broached.

Craig's television work includes the Channel 4 drama Saddam's Tribe, in which Stanley Townsend played Saddam Hussein, as well as episodes of The Musketeers, Robin Hood, Hustle, and Waterloo Road (BBC). Eventually, this dissolves into a narrow explanation of four stereotypes and their ineffectual attempts to find love. When Craig was two he moved with his family to the up-and-coming suburb of Mill Hill in North West London and attended first Radlett Prep and then Haberdashers' Aske's in Elstree. For his twelfth birthday a school friend bought him the text of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, of which he writes: “It blew my mind. The language, the anger, the humour. So close to the rhythms of my East End Jewish family.” [1] Craig describes his family as “loud, talkative, argumentative, and possibly too close for its own good.” [2] I’m from Generation X and liberal tolerance was our thing – that ideas mattered and could be debated. It feels this free exchange of ideas is being upended,” said Mr Craig. Craig's comedy Games for Lovers premiered at Waterloo's Vaults in the summer of 2019, directed by Anthony Banks, with a cast including Evanna Lynch and Billy Postlethwaite. In the Guardian, Miriam Gillinson summed it up as a portrait of "four young people [who] scour the internet and hang out in bars, searching madly for love in all the wrong places" and commented that "A giddy carefreeness underpins this light-hearted new comedy about love in the internet age – it feels as if everyone is cutting loose for the summer." [20]

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In doing so, and unusually for playwright Ryan Craig, they fail to make any particularly insightful statements about the state of the world or the kind of difficulties that people are likely to face in the real world in their efforts to discover long-term (or for that matter short-term) love. In this fresh, lively and often very funny book, playwright Ryan Craig makes a case for the vitality of playwriting in our contemporary world and offers a way into writing those plays. All of which begs the question, which of his plays does Craig think would never have seen the light of day in today’s political climate?

Craig has written for some of the country’s most potent playhouses, including the National Theatre, The Hampstead and The Menier Chocolate Factory. His themes are often Jewish. The Glass Room was about Holocaust denial; The Holy Rosenbergs focused on an Edgware-based family of kosher caterers whose son is killed while serving in the IDF. What worries me is the idea of segregating people in terms of ideology, class, race and gender. It is something that we all resisted before but now we seem to be blithely taking part in self-segregation.” Filthy Business (2017): ' A superbly modern Mother Courage …If plays survive by creating meaty roles for actors, Ryan Craig's new work is destined for a long life' (Michael Billington, Guardian) They get pretty nasty with each other,” says Craig. The work was inspired by a friend whose DNA test results subverted the connections he felt towards Sephardic Jews, Moroccans and Arabs. “He couldn’t help but be disappointed that he was 100 per cent Ashkenazi,” says Craig. It’s great that theatre is opening up to people who were previously marginalised,” says Craig. “That’s a good thing and we have further to go. But are we going to tell someone from an Armenian community that they can only write about an Armenian community? That doesn’t make sense.”Subject: A Jewish couple undertake DNA tests to establish their genetic antecedents only to find they have wildly different results which affects their relationship. Their understanding of their own identities and of each other has suddenly mutated. A chasm in the relationship opens. Craig next wrote Happy Savages, which John Peter in the Sunday Times characterized as a "tough, bruising play about vulnerable, bruised people". [4] It was produced at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith in 1998, with a cast including Kris Marshall and Hermione Gulliford, and after this Bradley offered Craig an eight-week writing attachment at the National Theatre Studio. [2]