Colin Chambers is emeritus professor of drama at Kingston University London. He wrote a history of the left-wing Unity Theatre (The Story of Unity Theatre, 1989), which was part of a nationwide movement that started in the 1930s and was strongly influenced by the considerable numbers of its Jewish members and, in the East End of London in particular, the experience of Yiddish theatre. After he left the Royal Shakespeare Company where he had been literary manager, Colin Chambers worked on a project with two American colleagues to research and then adapt three early twentieth-century Yiddish plays. They proposed to several theatres the idea of staging the three plays as a small festival of Yiddish theatre. Although they could not find any takers at the time, Chambers resurrected his adaptation of David Pinksi’s play Treasure (1902-6), which received notable productions from Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1910 and the Theatre Guild in New York in 1920. Chambers sent it to the Finborough Theatre in London, which produced it in 2015.

Plays

—. Treasure. London: Oberon Books, 2015.