Israeli ambassador-turned-playwright Daniel Taub has a new play opening

In May last year an unexpected figure mingled in the audience at north London’s Park Theatre. It was Daniel Taub, best known in the UK as Israel’s ambassador here between 2011 and 2015.

Taub was in London to see a rehearsed reading of a play he had written, then still a work in progress. Now all the edits and re-writes are done, and Winner’s Curse — written together with his long-time friend, Dan Patterson, is about to open at the Park on 8 February. (Patterson is both a playwright and TV show producer, known for Mock the Week and Whose Line Is It Anyway?)

It’s usually advised to first-time writers to write about what you know and thus Winner’s Curse draws heavily on Taub’s erstwhile career as a top-level diplomat who specialised in conflict negotiation.

A lawyer, he was frequently sent ‘into the room’ by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, where a touch of Taub humour and impeccable British manners often deflated tension.

Sitting in a cheerfully decorated compact studio in Highgate, where he was living temporarily during Park Theatre rehearsals, Taub explained that after taking part in head-to-head negotiations on a number of occasions, he had studied negotiation theory at Harvard, and then taught it at universities and think tanks around the world.

“But there is so much that you can’t convey in a lecture, and so much that is experiential. I just wanted to try and capture that. And a lot of what goes on in the negotiating room is quite dramatic. We’re talking about people grappling with conflicts of loyalty to themselves, to their partners — and ultimately to their loyalty that the people are sending them, and how they balance those things. That’s the stuff of drama”.

Taub is emphatic that this play (which he says is very funny as well as dramatic) is not about Israel-Palestinian negotiations — or indeed about other conflicts, including Ireland, which he and his team visited when talking to Palestinians, “to see what we could learn. It’s not specifically about any of them. But it does try and capture some of the dilemmas that are common to those situations”.

He didn’t want, he says, “to write a history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict”. Rather, he was searching for another angle: “What happens when a people sends an individual into a room to try and shape its future. [I wanted to show] what actually goes on there — and hopefully give the audience some practical suggestions [about resolving conflict)”.

Winner’s Curse opens with an award for the work he did in an unnamed peace process, given to an older diplomat, played by the TV presenter and barrister Clive Anderson. It’s his reminiscences that form the framework of the play. “We see, in his memory, all the different characters who took part in those negotiations, including his younger self”.

Anderson’s character relives the “high-stakes peace negotiations between two rival states” and Taub warns his audience to expect a “breaking of the fourth wall”, so that they are invited to take part in the negotiations process.

Because he didn’t want to set the play in the Middle East, Taub decided to make the conflict between two eastern European states “at a time when I thought such conflict was very unlikely”, he says, laughing.

So he has invented two warring countries, Garvestan and Molvania, and his characters have eastern European names.

It’s not a ‘cut-and-paste’ from any real-life negotiation that he has experienced, but the play brings in several issues that all negotiators face, such as what happens when something takes place outside the talks that could cause a breakdown in the negotiations – such as a terror attack or a kidnapping.

Taub is well aware that the negotiators themselves are “not free agents. There’s a line popular among diplomats, and I’ve put it in the play — that ‘you can change my opinion but you can’t change my instructions’. One of the dynamics of negotiation is that at some stage, the negotiators have to turn round and start negotiating with the people who sent them”.

Explaining the play’s title, Winner’s Curse, Taub says: “Sometimes one of the things to think about in negotiation is what success actually looks like — and sometimes the thing that you think you want isn’t necessarily the thing that is best for you in the long run. If you reach an agreement, it could be that it’s not the Great White Hope that you thought it would be.” So winning isn’t everything, and sometimes, he says, it can be a curse.

This is not Daniel Taub’s first rodeo at writing — he was also the creator and chief scriptwriter of a 2005 Israeli soap opera, Hechatzer, (In The Rabbi’s Court). But Winner’s Curse is the first play he has written for the theatre on this scale, and he has had enormous fun doing it, calling it “an antidote to working in government”.

These days Taub, who once worked as a programme consultant for Israel’s Channel 10, is no longer working full-time at Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild Foundation which he joined after leaving the UK as ambassador. But he now consults for Yad Hanadiv on several philanthropic programmes, and is involved in various creative projects in Israel, including more plays and some other television work. He teaches and lectures, too, mainly on his diplomatic work, and still has links with the Foreign Ministry, which sends him abroad on its behalf on speaker tours.

For now, however, his attention is firmly focused on Winner’s Curse. And Taub has, to his great satisfaction, been approached by a director in Israel with a view to possibly staging a Hebrew version of the play. He’s very curious as to what Israeli audiences think of his ideas — and notes with some wry amusement that “Israelis always think of themselves as good at negotiations”. Not every country, however, has a Daniel Taub to argue for it.

Winner’s Curse opens at Park Theatre on 8 February. www.parktheatre.co.uk