‘I hated school… so I went to the theatre’
AS TEENAGE rebellions go, Oscar Toeman’s was unimpressive. During his secondary school “rebellion”, Toeman would skip Wednesday afternoon PE to watch matinees at the nearby Globe, an experience, he says, that inspired him to pursue directing.
“I really hated school,” he explains, adding, he “was quite fat as a kid” who wasn’t especially athletic.
We spoke as he finished a day of rehearsals for Actually, the twohander by American playwright Anna Ziegler, which opened in the West End this week. It is Toeman’s West End directing debut.
Feeling different is something that comes up throughout our conversation. Toeman is the 32-year-old grandson of Holocaust refugees and he attended a Catholic school until he was 13.
“I think… you’re slightly confused as Jewish person growing up in the UK, because, in particular if you go to a non-Jewish school or anything like that… there are all of these things that you’re sort of expected to know about, and you don’t really know about them, because that’s not your own life experience…[At Catholic School] that sense, of like, do I bow? What am I meant to do? I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t really get this,” he says.
Later, he adds: “One of the virtues and one of the curses [of being Jewish is] … you stand outside of a culture. You’re part of something, but you’re also slightly separate from it.”
Questions around otherness, expectation and confusion are woven throughout Actually, a critically-acclaimed play about two Princeton students who become the subjects of a controversial “Title IX” investigation following their drunken sexual encounter. Confident musician Tom believes what happened was consensual; highly-strung and awkward Amber thinks she was raped.
Amber is Jewish, a perspective Toeman believes is integral to the play’s tension and the character’s connection with African-American Tom.
“This play is about outsiders, and two people who don’t feel like they fit in,” he says.
“Amber absolutely sees the world through a Jewish prism… there’s a wonderful sense of Jewish neurosis that’s very alive and well in the character… and that comes across in the rhythm, but also in the way she understands the world, and [she forges] connections that other people might see as bizarre.”
Toeman gives an example, one of his favourite lines in the play, when Amber says, “I don’t want to be so naïve as to say Jews and AfricanAmericans have all this stuff in common, but they have some stuff in common… like not really wanting to go camping, or to Nantucket, and also the deep and unwavering fear that any moment they will be rounded up and killed.” Oscar Toeman in rehearsals for
“I completely understand that impulse,” explains Toeman, “and at the same time intellectually understand how horrific it is… to say that to an African American or a person of colour in America in 2017.
“At the same time, if you look at what’s going on in the Labour Party in the UK, or if you look at the rise of antisemitism around the world, you think, it’s only been 75 years since the Holocaust, and look what’s going on again.”
The quote reminds me of the Jewish activists protesting at immigration detention centres in America, I tell him.
“Absolutely,” he replies. “And it might not happen to the Jews immediately… but there’s a thing where it’s like, this can never happen again, and Jews have a responsibility to stop other things like this happening as well.”
Toeman, who was a staff director at the National Theatre in 2015, is a self-described “crazy-fast” talker who often interrupts his own flurried thoughts when they spark new ideas. It’s one of the reasons, he says, he could never be an actor: “I think the idea of me being on stage, the running times would be significantly shorter, but it might not necessarily be to the audience’s benefit.”
He’s spent a lot of time thinking about audiences during Actually’s rehearsal process.
Though the cast and creative team openly shared their own opinions about what happened between Amber and Tom, their goal was to leave the play “on a knife edge… and allow the audience to make up their own minds.
“We live in a world where we’re fed tribalistic messages, we’re told what to think [and] to pick a side and that’s it.”
“One of the reasons I like this play is that we’re so often told, ‘Believe in Britain’ or whatever it is and we’re fragmenting as a kind of collective society.
“What does it mean to be an audience? It’s just a bunch of random people but in the context of this piece every individual will come out and then there’s going to be that discussion. ‘Well, I thought this. Oh! You thought it was this? I thought it was that’…”
“Polarisation can only really work with two binary options, and the idea of the shades of grey that come from this play… there’s something quite challenging to an audience in that respect, I think.”
‘Actually’ is at the Trafalgar Studio2 until August 31