Its premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, in a production directed by Ken Loach, was abandoned because of protests, and criticism by two historians, over its controversial and tendentious claims.
[1] The play makes use of a libel trial in Israel in 1954–55 concerning allegations of collaboration during the Second World War in 1944 between the leadership of the Zionist movement in Hungary and the Nazis.
Its starting point was the trial of Rudolf Kastner, a leading member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, whose job was to help Jews escape from Nazi-ruled Hungary.
His libel trial in Israel concerned an accusation that he had collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, one of the main SS officers in charge of carrying out the Holocaust.
[clarification needed] The play’s text includes such analogies as “the Zionist knife in the Nazi fist” (which was cut in the pre-production period)[5] and accuses Jewish leaders: “To save your hides, you practically led them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz”.
"[10] Chaim Bermant wrote in The Jewish Chronicle that Allen "suggests that the entire leadership of the Zionist movement ... people who strained every ounce of their being to do all that could be done to save European Jews – were involved in a dark conspiracy to betray them.
"[11] David Cesarani wrote that, like Brenner in his book, Allen drew on anti-Zionist stereotypes originating in the Soviet Union which have a "Jewish conspiracy theory" at their centre.
[14] Max Stafford-Clark, then the artistic director of the Royal Court, rejected assertions the play was antisemitic or contained errors, but said that continuing with the production would cause "great distress to sections of the community".
[19] In 1999, the play was performed at the Gate Theatre in London in a production by Elliot Levey, Loach's son-in-law, in what David Jay, writing for the New Statesman, described as "a significantly rewritten version".