Torrey Townsend (The Workshop) sent shockwaves through the theater world with his controversial Off Broadway four years ago. Now he returns with an adaptation of I.W. Bruntmole’s Jewish Plot, a long-lost English melodrama whose first performance in London in 1889 unleashed a grand furore.
Bruntmole’s play holds a singular place in the British repertoire as perhaps the only work of its period to depict Jewish life with unflinching candor at a moment when Shylocks and Fagins were the sole Israelites to grace Victorian stages.
It is not known why Jewish Plot disappeared from the canon, but it might have something to do with its slightly incongruous combination of scathing political-moral critique with intermittent musical numbers throughout. Nevertheless, Townsend plans to restore this unsung masterpiece to its rightful place.
Will it provoke as grand a furore now as it did in its own time?
