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Hopeful or ‘hate-fuelled’? Film of controversial play about Israel gets London premiere

Director says Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, which provoked fury at its first production in 2009, is a ‘family story’ at heart

Now the play has been filmed and is to open officially in London at the end of this month, at a time when the Middle East has been rocked by devastating violence and, in Britain, allegiances are more contested than ever. Behind the film is London-based Omri Dayan, a 23-year-old US-Israeli director, who said this weekend that he was “braced” for all the contention to come, but was drawn to make his version “not because of its politics, but because of its humanity – for me it is a family story.” The Times’s 2009 review said it was evidence of “straitjacketed political orthodoxy”, while novelist Howard Jacobson described it as a “hate-fuelled little chamber piece” in the Independent, warning it was part of “a gradual habituation of a language of loathing”.

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