Fickle fortune

‘I couldn’t understand most of it. I mean I could understand each word but not when they were put together,’ says one of the characters in Tulips in Winter on Radio Three on Sunday night. I knew immediately what he meant. There was something wonderful going on in Michelene Wandor’s play word for word, but I’m not quite sure I caught it all in just one sitting.

Wandor, a prizewinning playwright with a passion for radio, has been inspired by Rembrandt’s paintings and Spinoza’s works of philosophy to create a drama about the Jews of Amsterdam in the 1650s who were caught up in the trading battles between the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese. This was the Golden Age of Holland; when Amsterdam and The Hague were at the centre of the universe, trading exotic spices and ideas between East and West. Wandor’s characters are involved in wily negotiations about cardamon and coffee as the other European powers struggle to infiltrate Holland’s hugely wealthy network of trade. Cromwell, through his spies from Whitehall, hopes to gain influence by befriending the Jews of Amsterdam, including Spinoza, the young Portuguese-born Jew who has abandoned trade for philosophy. Spinoza annoys everyone by asserting defiantly that there are no angels, there is no soul. The Jews excommunicate him; Amsterdam falls prey to its trading predators.

It was rather a lot for just one play and the confusion of characters, between whom it was not always easy to distinguish, meant that it did not make for easy listening. But still, the effort required to follow what was going on was rewarded by some fascinating bits of dialogue about what it means to believe, and the corruption that ensues when religion gets mixed up with politics.