Global Jewish Plays: Five Works by Jewish Playwrights from around the World
A unique collection of plays that brings together stories of Jewish life from playwrights around the world.
Curated and edited by international theatre collective Global Voices Theatre, these five plays showcase the dazzling multiplicity of Jewish narratives across the globe: the haunting, the challenging, the joyful.
From a legendary North African warrior queen to queer French avant-garde artists during World War II; from Israel-Palestine tensions made personal to protests in Istanbul amidst intergenerational trauma, this is a genre-spanning collection that probes at the heart of what it means to be Jewish - past, present, and future.
Curated by Jewish-Lebanese Brazilian queer theatre maker Victor Esses, the plays were performed at London's Bush Theatre as part of Global Voices Theatre's popular live events. At a sensitive time for Jewish communities in the UK and beyond, the original event Global Jewish Voices aimed to engage the UK Jewish community and make space for nuanced conversations and representation. This collection of selected plays is a legacy of the event and opens up avenues for wider audiences to read and perform the works.
Global Voices Theatre is a female-, non-binary, migrant-led theatre company that explores and platforms international marginalised voices. They have curated events with partners such as Bush Theatre, Border Crossings, AWAN, British Library, and Roundhouse. The plays showcased at the event that led to GVT’s creation were published as Global Queer Plays.
Zhui Ning Chang (she/they) is a Malaysian editor, writer, educator, sensitivity reader and theatre maker based in London, UK. Her work engages with topics such as decolonialisation, migration and diaspora, speculative futures, and building support and solidarity through storytelling.