Bernard Kops
East End ‘barrow-boy’ playwright, poet and novelist whose folksy, often surrealistic work illuminated the Jewish experience in Britain
BERNARD KOPS, who has died aged 97, was an East End-born playwright, poet and novelist whose first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957), enjoyed worldwide success and saw him rated alongside Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney as part of the late-1950s British new wave. Yet while he typically selected “realistic” domestic settings for his fiction, poetry, and plays, he rarely touched on political unrest or class prejudice; instead he often incorporated surrealistic, dreamlike elements and larky song-and-dance routines more typical of traditional Jewish theatre. His endings, too, were usually happy.
When The Hamlet of Stepney Green was first performed in 1958, at the Oxford Playhouse, The Daily Telegraph described its author as “a 29-year-old barrow boy” who had written the play in three days while sitting in a gutter near Cambridge Circus.
Subtitled “a sad comedy with some songs”, the play was set in the 1950s East End and portrayed the death throes of the community in which Kops had been brought up, through the story of an invalid Jewish fishmonger who believes his life has been “poisoned” by an unsatisfactory marriage.
After his death his son, a wannabe crooner, learning of his mother’s proposal to remarry, prepares for vengeance. But the father’s amiable ghost, presuming that his widowed wife might now be happy, gives the son a love potion, pretending it is poison; and the young man ends up marrying his newly married mother’s stepdaughter.
A one-time communist turned anarchist, Kops wrote more than 40 plays for television, stage and radio, 10 novels, eight volumes of poetry and two of autobiography. His stage work included The Dream of Peter Mann (1960), a loose reworking of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; Enter Solly Gold (1962), a comedy in which a con artist convinces a depressed Jewish shoe tycoon that he is the Messiah in order to steal his money; Playing Sinatra (1991), about a middle-aged brother and sister who defuse the tensions of their claustrophobic existence by a mutual obsession with the songs of Frank Sinatra, and Dreams of Anne Frank (1992), a tragicomic expressionist play with music based on The Diary of Anne Frank, hailed by one reviewer as a “virtuoso handling of dream logic”.
Kops’s work, however, was rarely seen in major theatres; his folksy idiom, his extensive work in radio and television and his work as a novelist perhaps distracting attention from his dramatic achievements. After his second play, Goodbye World (1959), flopped at the Guildford Playhouse, Kops became addicted to amphetamines and struggled for many years with depression and thoughts of suicide.
But his experience of the fragility of the human psyche made him capable of understanding – even empathising with – people and views far removed from his own. A notable example was his play Ezra (1981), an exploration of the madness of Ezra Pound, imprisoned as a traitor by the Allies for his broadcasts on behalf of fascism.
Kops succeeded in evoking pity as well as condemnation by showing Pound as a man afflicted with a naivety which cannot comprehend that he has helped to kill people he liked and admired. Staged at the New Half Moon in Mile End Road, with Ian Mcdiarmid playing the tortured poet, it led to Kops being recognised as a master of dramatic dream poetry.
One of seven children, Bernard Kops was born in Stepney, east London, on November 28 1926 to Jewish parents, Joel Kops, a tailor, and his mother, Jenny (née Zetter), who had moved to Britain to escape grinding poverty in Amsterdam in the early 1900s, only to find themselves mired in grinding poverty in the East End. Joel, Bernard recalled, had saved to buy a ticket to America, but the ticket only took him as far as London: “He was one of the yearning masses who never made it. He yearned for the rest of his life – in Stepney.”
Kops’s childhood home was a one-bedroom flat in Brick Lane, where he and his siblings shared two beds. The family relied on moneylenders and charity to get by, eating at the soup kitchen and they also featured joyful family gatherings, full of music, jokes and argument, with the traditional Jewish food provided by his ever-resourceful mother.
His formal education, at Stepney Jewish primary school, ended when he was 13 during the Blitz. A brief period as an evacuee in a Buckinghamshire village opened his eyes to a different life: “We’d never cleaned our teeth up till then. And hot water came from the tap. And there was a lavatory upstairs. And carpets.”
Though many members of his family lost their lives in the Holocaust, his immediate family had been spared, he claimed, because his father had not been able to raise the money to take them home to Holland.
Kops’s real education began after the war, at Whitechapel Library, where he read everything from the Brontës to Tagore and decided to become a writer. When the library closed after 113 years in 2005 he read a poem thanking the Library for what it had given him and many other young Jewish hopefuls in a celebration organised by the Jewish East End Commemoration Society. “The door of the library was the door into me,” he wrote.
At the same time he became obsessed with Yiddish theatre, known for its enthusiastic audience participation, after going to see The King of Lampedusa at the Grand Palais (a Jewish folk theatre on the Commercial Road) with his father at the end of the war. During an East End performance of King Lear with an all-jewish cast, he recalled a woman standing up and calling out to the actor playing Lear: “How can you do that, you bastard, to nice Jewish girls?”
As he laboured with no success to establish himself as a writer, he sustained himself for a decade as a docker, hotel washer-upper, chef, occasional actor, brothel tout in Tangier, and barrow boy working for a bookstall at Cambridge Circus. Along the way he had a breakdown, got married and divorced and drifted to the then-bohemian world of Soho.
In his first autobiography, The World Is a Wedding (1963), he wrote: “I could be as mad as I wanted... In a cafe called The Alex I wrote the day away... The bums of Soho became my family, the cafe my womb... We just sat in the cafe waiting, waiting for another day to kill itself. Every time the door opened we looked up as if we were expecting someone. We wandered from cafe to cafe. ‘Have you been to Tony’s? Who was there?’ ‘No one.’”
It was the writer and poet Dom Moraes, whom he first met in “The French” cafe in Old Compton Street, who put him on the road to success. “‘You’ve written a play, I hear. But is it a masterpiece?’ were his first words to me. ‘I do hope it’s a masterpiece.’ Me, in my green arrogant years replied, ‘Yes. It probably is a masterpiece.’
“That morning, he took me around the corner to Greek Street, where David Archer had opened a brilliant and pristine bookshop; needless to say, it did not last long. David owned a third of Wiltshire, and could not wait to give it away. Dom introduced me to David and sang my genius, although he had not read a word of mine. I was not embarrassed, and did not contradict him. I asked David about his ability to recognise talent. ‘Dear boy, I know absolutely nothing about poetry. I just have a certain instinct for certain people’.
So Dom took me to David, and David pointed me in the right direction... My writing life and career was born.”
In 1956 he married Erica Gordon, whom he credited with helping him to overcome the depression and drug addiction which led him in 1975 to attempt suicide. “I remember feeling I’d had enough”, he told the Ham and High in 2008. “In the middle of the night, I opened the window and crawled out. My wife Erica tried to pull me back.
“I said this is it. I went towards Kilburn and Maida Vale where there was this great big Victorian wall and I thought I would drive at incredible speed towards it. So I got there and started to speed up. As I did, I had a strange logic which came to me. It said, ‘Yes, you’re allowed to kill yourself but then this deed will hang over your children and your wife. You’re entitled to take your own life but not that of others.’
“I thought it’s either death or bagels – so I drove to Vallance Road [in Bethnal Green] and went home with hot bagels. It was one of the turning points of my life.”
Kops described himself as “a great joiner and a great getterout-of sort of person”. He had joined the Communist Party in 1947, and though he resigned six months later, he remained active for many years in supporting the Soviet Union through petitions, conferences, and so on.
But in a powerful mea culpa after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he said: “We did the Russians’ work for them: we were so bloody naive... Writers like me have done so much for the image of Russia: now I feel ashamed.”
His work for television included the Emmy-nominated film It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow (1975), about the Bethnal Green tube disaster of March 3 1943, when 173 people, including 62 children, using the station as a bomb shelter, were crushed to death in the worst civilian tragedy of the war. For many years he gave master classes in playwriting and in later life he wrote travel pieces for The Guardian, whose readers were no doubt surprised to find him an aficionado of Saga cruises.
In 2009, when Kops was accorded the rare honour of a Civil List pension, the Telegraph’s Mandrake columnist Tim Walker remarked: “It is not every day that an 83-year-old anarchist is awarded a Civil List pension by the Queen.”
Bernard Kops is survived by his wife Erica and by their three daughters and a son.