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. The Holy Rosenbergs, National Theatre: Cottesloe, London". The Independent. 18 March 2011 . Retrieved 21 December 2018. Craig is at pains to say that the play is fiction. But the territory in which he sets it is straight out of his father’s shop on the Holloway Road. AR: If I had to answer the question: What is the spark of these plays? It is the understanding that comedy and tragedy are the same thing. And for a lot of us [Jewish playwrights] that is just in our bones. 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.”

Craig's next play was The Holy Rosenbergs, which premiered at the National Theatre in 2011, directed by Laurie Sansom and starring Henry Goodman. It centres on the North London Rosenberg family, kosher caterers, on the eve of their son's funeral. Danny, a pilot in the Israeli air-force, had been killed in action over Gaza; his sister, Ruth, is a lawyer investigating alleged human rights abuses by the Israeli Defence Forces. The play examines family conflict, guilt and the impact of Israeli politics within the London Jewish community. Critics compared the play to Arthur Miller's All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, [14] and Craig indeed shares Miller's obsession with achieving ethical clarity in a nebulous world. Writing for The Arts Desk, Aleks Sierz applauded a play that "buzzes with discussion and debate", concluding that "In the clarity of its construction, the tension of its climax and the slow unveiling of its emotional core, this is a very fine play indeed". [15] In The Times, Libby Purves wrote that "The play educates and provokes" and "is startlingly fair" – "clear, gripping, moving, at times extremely funny, and important". [16] 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.” Perhaps the most rewarding elements relate to the impulses that persuade someone to become a playwright in the first place and then facilitate their work. A scared playwright won't write a good play. We're going to have to try to find a bit more steel.' – TelegraphCritic Aleks Sierz has commented that Craig “learnt much of his craft by writing for television and radio.” [28] Ryan Craig (born 9 January 1972) is a British playwright, whose plays usually probe both social norms and ethical issues. He is also a writer for screen, television and radio.

What We Did to Weinstein (2005): ' There is no more compelling or politically significant drama in town than Ryan Craig's What We Did to Weinstein ….fascinates because it reflects the complex passions of Jews in more than two minds about what Jewishness entails' (Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard) 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.

About the contributors

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. A review of Daniel Kanaber’s play Shiver at the Watford Palace, published in the Jewish Quarterly 61/1, 2014: 52-53. 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.