Thursday Talks: The Glasgow Jewish Institute Players
Thursday 06 June, 6pm for 6.30pm
£10 GAC Members, £12 Non-members, £5 Students
The Glasgow Jewish Institute Players was a remarkable community-based theatre group, active from 1936 to 1960, that established an ambitious new model of non-professional theatre in Scotland. Under its charismatic founder, the director and playwright Avrom Greenbaum (1903-1963), the GJIP produced a wide repertoire of work in a range of different styles that explored the diversity of modern Jewish identity – from plays that looked back to Eastern Europe and dramas celebrating Jewish life in contemporary Britain to work by American Jewish writers that explored the possibility of life in the New World. This illustrated talk will outline the history and achievements of the GJIP, and the work of Avrom Greenbaum, exploring the group’s repertoire and its links with American Jewish theatre makers in New York, before finishing by examining one of Greenbaum’s most notable productions, his 1944 staging of Ben Hecht’s The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Speaker Biographies:
Paul Maloney is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatre, ethnic stage representations, music hall and pantomime. His recent publications include The Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Adrienne Scullion is Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests include Scottish theatre and drama from the eighteenth century to the present day, theatre for children and young people and cultural policy.
Image reproduced By permission of the Scottish Theatre Archive, University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.
Full photo caption:
Josephine Goldsmith (left) as Sadie and Ida Schuster as Becky Felderman in the Glasgow Jewish Institute Players’ 1959 revival of Sylvia Regan’s Morning Star. Photograph by permission of the Scottish Theatre Archive, University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.
Non-members please book via eventbrite