Pascal Theatre Company Announces World Première Of Julia Pascal's 12:37

Pascal Theatre Company has announced the world première of 12:37 at Finborough Theatre, the new play from award-winning writer and director Julia Pascal. The drama opens at Finborough Theatre on 1 December, with previews from 29 November, and runs until 21 December.

Julia Pascal says: "A secret history of how Irish nationalism influenced Jewish nationalists is at the heart of this play. The text is influenced by interviews with men who fought the British in Palestine and also by my own Dublin Jewish family and their conflicted relationships with Israel."

At 12:37pm on 22 July 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. Ninety-one people were killed, forty-six wounded. The explosion was carried out by right-wing Zionists, targeting the headquarters of the British in Palestine.

Two Irish Jewish brothers journey from Dublin to combat antisemitism on the streets of East London. Their Irish nationalism propels them towards Jewish nationalism in the common struggle against British Imperialism.

12:37 raises complex and controversial questions around Jewish violence, homeland and national identity in a stunning new play that is both a hard-hitting historical epic and an intimate family drama.

Julia Pascal trained as an actor before starting her career as a playwright and theatre director. She performed at The National Theatre, RSC, Nottingham Playhouse and Royal Court. Her adaptation of Dorothy Parker's prose and poetry as a Platform Performance, which ran for two years, marked her as the first female director at The National Theatre. As a director, she has toured Harold Pinter's The Caretaker for the British Council. For The Orange Tree she was Associate Director where her productions included the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Fay Weldon. Her stage writing exposes hidden Jewish and other diaspora stories as well as highlighting women's unrepresented lives. Twenty-one of her stage plays have been produced in the UK and internationally. These include the Tricycle Theatre commission Crossing Jerusalem and The Holocaust Trilogy, which includes her adaption of Solomon Anski's The Dybbuk. In 2019, Blueprint Medea premiered at the Finborough Theatre. This re-visioned classic is inspired by Kurdish women soldiers fighting for national identity. Pascal's plays have been produced at the Lyric Theatre, Riverside Studios, Arcola Theatre, Park Theatre, Tricycle Theatre, New End Theatre, Finborough Theatre and Edinburgh Festivals. In New York, she has presented work at Theatre for the New City and the Lincoln Centre's Director's Lab. Her awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, Arts Council England, the BBC Alfred Bradley Prize, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, Moondance Columbine Prize, the Goethe Institute and the European Association for Jewish Culture. She was a finalist in The Judith Royer Award for Excellence in Playwriting and has just been offered a grant from the Jewish Historical Society England. Pascal has also written for television and radio. She is currently working on the community play Dancing, Trailblazing, Taboo!, on the life of Eleanor Marx for The Bloomsbury Festival, in collaboration with London Contemporary Dance School. For 2023, Pascal is developing a new drama, As Happy as God in France, which reveals reluctant histories in the lives of Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Salomon. With Mary Luckhurst, she is currently co-writing The Doctoress. After gaining her doctorate from the University of York, Pascal became a Research Fellow at King's College, London.

12:37

Finborough Theatre

118 Finborough Road, London SW10 9ED

29 November - 21 December 2022

Press night: Thursday 1 and Friday 2 December at 7:30pm

Tuesday to Saturday at 7.30pm

Saturday and Sunday matinees at 3pm

Box Office: 020 7244 7439

finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Tickets from £10 - £23

Pascal Theatre Company was founded by Julia Pascal in 1983 for the production of new writing. Until 1990 it focused on producing new work by a variety of authors including Carole Rumens, Seamus Finnegan, Jane Beeson, Melanie Phillips and Karim Alrawi. Most productions were directed by Julia Pascal and staged at London theatres, including the Lyric Studio, Riverside Studios, Lilian Baylis and Finborough Theatre. In 2012, the musical Staying Out Late, produced by Ags Irwin for older lesbian and gay performers, was presented at the Drill Hall. The company has engaged in several major Heritage projects including Jewish Mothers & Daughters: A Film Archive, The Secret Listeners, Discovering & Documenting England's Lost Jews and currently on a two-year project Women for Women: Bloomsbury 1800-1900 funded by the Lottery Heritage Fund. Since 2021 the company has embarked on collaborations with young performers from London Contemporary Dance School to produce site-specific performances at the Bloomsbury Festival. In 2023, the Company is presenting A Manchester Girlhood in Blackpool and Manchester. Collaborations with other producers include Kati Hind and Katrin Hilbe for a touring production of Pascal's anti-racist satirical play St Joan seen at the Edinburgh Festival, the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and in Liechtenstein.

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