NO CAMELS IN ISRAEL
by Kon Fraser
Directed by Roger Saxton-Howes
Cast:
Jean Harding, Gillian Redhead, Peter Stansfield, Anthony Webb, Tony Worth
THE AUTHOR
Kon Fraser was a British playwright and screenwriter whose work encompassed theatre and television. She began writing her first full-length play after returning from Kenya with her family and while living aboard an old boat which subsequently sank. Two of her plays, Eleven Plus and Sacred Cow, received Sunday-night productions at the Royal Court Theatre. The Questors presented The Igloo in the 1965 New Plays Festival and No Camels in Israel in 1968.
The Igloo was subsequently produced professionally at the Edinburgh Festival, with a cast headed by Beatrix Lehmann and Shelagh Fraser. Fraser also wrote for television during the 1960s, including contributions to the BBC anthology series Thirty-Minute Theatre.
Article about Kon Fraser in the Buckinghamshire Advertiser, 4 July 1968
THE PLAY
QUESTOPICS, June 1968
If IN SEARCH OF A MAN is set in Israel, it will come as no surprise to any true Questor to hear that NO CAMELS IN ISRAEL is played out in a suburban council house. Kon Fraser's hero Dan, is not such a foolish man as King Lear, perhaps because he is younger, and he has only one daughter who returns home bringing Lud, a disturbing stranger.
Unlike Lear's wife (if he ever had one) Dan's wife Ruth is not easily mislaid. Without her, the play would be impossible. Without her friend Bob it would be different. Without Auntie there would be no point to the triangle for it to balance and rock on and the whole oddly secure relationship would probably topple over.
The author wrote NO CAMELS... when she started worrying about the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in West Germany, but many other factors impinged upon its development. But it is a play, sometimes funny, sometimes macabre, about sacrifice quite unnecessarily undertaken.
Perhaps after all, there is something here in common with Lear. There is a size about the foolishness, and a selfless dedication in the selfishness of the principal character in both plays.
PRODUCTION PHOTOS
PRESS RESPONSE
Kon Fraser’s domestic drama was treated by both reviewers as a serious exploration of self-sacrifice, guilt and family responsibility, but neither felt its various themes were fully brought into focus. Amateur Stage admired the important questions raised by Dan’s devotion to his helpless aunt and the revelation of her experience at Belsen, while finding the play’s central purpose unclear and its strands too widely dispersed. The Stage praised the understanding direction and acting and found that the play moved effectively apart from some drawn-out passages, but likewise questioned which aspect of human folly was intended as its principal target. Both reviews recognised the play’s thoughtful ambition while finding its dramatic emphasis insufficiently defined.
Amateur Stage
The Stage and Television Today
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
NO CAMELS IN ISRAEL