‘I’ve entered the Jewish stage of my career’

Simon Yadoo’s relationship with his beard seems similar to that which other people have with their pets. It is very tactile, this bond between man and his thicket. There is a lot of stroking and preening as we discuss the two plays that have kept the actor busy over the last couple of months.

These are Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah, JW3’s second Jewish panto in which Yadoo plays villain and East End wicked fashion workshop owner Calvin Brine (Brine, Klein – geddit?) and What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander’s adaptation of his own 2012 short story which collides Israeli-flavoured Orthodox Judaism with diaspora secularism.

Yadoo’s character Yerucham, a hashish-smoking Chasid and his wife Shoshana (Dorothy Myer Bennett) embody the first of these camps while Miami Jews Phil and Debbie (West Wing actor Joshua Malina and Caroline Catz) are the second archetypes.

For the play, which is directed by Patrick Marber, Englander updated the original 2012 short story on which it is based to reflect today’s Jewish anxieties. The war in Gaza figures strongly and the two Jewish world views clash physically when Yadoo’s Yerucham and Malina’s Phil end up fighting on Phil’s living room floor.

“It is really a middle-aged fight – a bit handbags,” says Yadoo. “We’re both north of 40. I don't want to do any big stage combat moments.”

It was for Yerucham that Yadoo grew the beard. “You have to own it,”  he says while tugging it gently. Though it does rather look as if it is the beard that owns him. Whoever calls the shots in the relationship the beard will stay for while yet because What We Talk About... is being given a second run in January.

“I've been acting professionally for 19 years,” says the 45-year-old. “But until What We Talk About... I had never played a Jewish role. It hadn’t mattered to me. And then in more recent years, particularly since I've had children, I sort of thought I'd quite like to be a bit more identified with my cultural heritage,” says Yadoo, who having worked at the RSC, agrees that he has definitely entered what might be called the Jewish phase of his career.

“I'm enjoying it. It's nice to connect with [my Jewishness] and to be in two very contrasting Jewish pieces.”

He was raised in the Surrey village of Tadworth, near Epsom, as almost literally the only Jew in the village. “I think at every school I went to, there were only two,” he says.

Yadoo’s new found connection to his heritage coincides with a hostility towards Jews in the arts according to a recently JC-convened panel who work in the sector. Sometimes this has been described as a reticence to tell Jewish stories, a phenomenon evidenced by the very play to which Yadoo is returning in January when it will extend its run at The Marylebone.

But it wasn’t always going to go there. The play was first offered to a major theatre and accepted by its artistic director only for it to be rejected by the theatre’s board. However, Yadoo has not yet detected a shift in attitudes towards him personally.

“I haven't felt that my relationships have in any way been affected by what's going on at the moment and by my identity being sort of underlined. I have a very close friend who's an Anglo-Palestinian actress who came to What We Talk About... and found it very moving. We're very respectful of all of the emotions that can be brought up by what's happening [(in Gaza and Israel]. She felt it was even-handed, as I think most people did. I think the play allows non-Jewish audience members to see that there is not one [Jewish] view. It’s very obvious when you're within the community that we often disagree and that people have different or nuanced views on things. But not so much if you’re outside it.”

Sometimes the differences are not so nuanced: the on-stage bun fight between two Jewish men, for example. Meanwhile the panto’s physicality is more of the dancing kind.

“I didn't think of myself as a singer and a dancer but I have two numbers in Goldie Frocks,” says Yadoo proudly.

It has, he adds been especially enjoyable to discover how to play two very different kinds of Jews. Calvin Brine is “Jewish because he is Jewish” whereas Yerucham is performed “respectively with very Jewish gestures.”

“It's so lovely to have the juxtaposition of these two shows,’ says Yadoo. “Panto is the bedrock of British theatre and is so good for theatres to have as an income generator. But with Goldie Frocks there is also this lovely Jewish feel over the top of it.”

As for the facial hair, which has a distinguished smattering of grey below the chin area, Yadoo has come to associate growing beards with doing good work. He grew one for much of his Shakespeare work.

“I have come to realise that some kind of beard tends to accompany my most fruitful periods,” he says while pulling so affectionately at the bush’s longer fronds one wonders if it might begin to purr. Will he keep it after finishing with his two current Jewish roles?

“I think I’ll just trim it down,” he says.

Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah is at JW3 until Jan 5, 2025

jw3.org.uk

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is at The Marylebone Theatre from January 20 – February 15

https://tickets.marylebonetheatre.com/tickets/series/wwtawwtaaf