Monthly Archives: March 2026

MYSTICISM AND MISCHIEF 

       This extraordinary show from Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story (and absolutely not with  the Streisand movie ending)  –  drove Sydney Opera House audiences and critics wild. And this adventurous little theatre is an obvious place for the UK premiere, with its gift for finding Jewish-related plays both light and devastatingly dark.  But this is the first time Marylebone has plunged so joyfully – surtitles and all – into the curious judaeo-German-Hebrew-Slavic-Aramaic Yiddish language and also,  barring one golem in The White Factory, the first time it has gone so deep into the weird, mystical tale-telling world of that tradition. 

       And – full disclosure – there was a point in the first half when I thought that it demanded slightly too high a tolerance of two things: Talmudic picturesquery,  and the often tiresomely intellectualized  “queer theory” which is lavishly pointed up in the programme.    But I give in.  It’s rather wonderful:  intelligent and wild and wise and, especially in the second half,  profoundly touching.  It’s springingly alive, so  L’chaim to it! 

       Bashevis Singer’s central story of Yentle the 1870  “Yeshiva boy”  is timeless, and for women a vital, enlivening one.  Our heroine is desperate for the deep study of Torah and Talmud which only males study, but “a learned woman is  an abomination” and women are for breeding , kitchen and marketplace .   So  when her father dies she dresses as a boy, becomes a loyal study-partner to Avigdor,  who has no idea. While pleading his cause with the lovely Hodes, Yentl under her new name finds herself the object of the girl’s adoration.  Think of Twelfth Night, Viola, Olivia and Orsino. Or of the constant interpretation of male and female behaviour by a disguised Rosalind in As You LIke It. 

         But here there is no easy way out:  even when it would be possible for Yentl to confess she cannot bear to,  because she needs this learning, godliness and mystery for her own sake.  And you don’t get more feminist than that. There is a devastating moment when she admits her sex to Avigdor, taking off her top to show her breasts, but cannot bear not to reach out and put the tasseled prayer-shawl, the Tallit,  back on.  Not for modesty , but for sheer need.   It’s about prayer. 

        Amy Hack is extraordinary in the role; when she speaks or sings in Yiddish hairs stand up on your neck.  But she always conveys the trapped , baffled but determined reality of a young girl, and  there is comedy in the awkwardness of finding herself a ‘man among men`’ , in settings where boys wistfully talk of sex and swim naked.  Ashley Margolis’ Avigdor is  perfect too, and Genevieve Kingsford, the most deeply baffled of the three, a graceful presence as Hodes.  But the whole is framed, often narrated,  by  Evelyn Krape as “The Figure::  ancient, dishevelled, wild and bawdy and mischievous  in several characters and arguments, yelling and laughing, donning goat-horns, primitive in sexless power..  From the opening moments The Figure expresses old mysticisms:  the completeness of God who contains  both male and female, so Yentl is a kind of flawed, biologically impossible image of that perfection.  Except that of course we are in an Ashkenazi shtetl in 1870, not heaven and eternity, and there is biology to contend with. And despite it she does marry Hodes, and the Figure brandishes a bloodstained wedding sheet .   But then as reality kicks in the poor bride is pleading for her ‘man’, demanding ‘he” come to her bed more often as the holy books prescribe.  And meanwhile Avigdor yearns for her, but at one point embraces his “bruder” , until he discovers the truth .

       Hence the “queerness” theme much talked up:  two apparent men together, two real women together,  one Yentl being both male and female:  a  reproductive conundrum but real love and a quest for mystical completeness. Around it all the often alarming Krape cavorts, addressing us with glee . It’s  staged in often dim light, sometimes with sudden sound,  always with a lucid narrative and clarity of emotion from the central players.

         In the theological arguments there is plenty to chew on – fascinating to hear the sin of Adam and Eve explained as the snake being deliberately “made by God because the fruit needed to be eaten”.   That chimed weirdly in my convent-girl head with “O Felix culpa” and the medieval chant `’blessed be the time that apple eaten was”. 

              But even without all that,  the central story of a girl in disguise is universal and inspiring.   It’s Viola and Joan of Arc and Margaret who became James Barry to train and become a miltary surgeon. It’s sweet Polly Oliver and all the lasses who followed their men to the war in breeches. You can set aside modish queer-theory and trans-politics, and be reminded that at the heart of the story is the ancient outrage of women being excluded from learning and mental growth. And the determination of women who decided that no, this just won’t do…and wore the trousers.  

marylebonetheatre.com. to 12 April 

rating 4

BROKEN HEARTS AND MACAROONS: A DISTANT WAR CLOSE TO HOME

         How is it for a family to be a symbol, focus and vortex of murderous global disharmony?   The Rosenbergs know:  North London Jewish in  the 2009 Gaza/ Israel crisis.   Honourably brave for the Menier to revive Ryan Craig’s play right now in an even worse Middle East war , in a city marred by furious weekly demonstrations  and antisemitic attacks.  Craig has actually kept the setting in the original timeframe, but the resonance is even stronger.  In the living-room tradition and fragile pride is  evoked with fierce detail : silver and glassware cabinets, brown furniture ,a tidy suite.  But on its sofa an untidy young Jonny lies with a racing paper listening to rap, only  reluctantly getting up to call his sister Ruth when Simon the Rabbi arrives.  He pauses to shudder about  new fake roman-pillars his socially ambitious Dad has put up by the door. “Chav-palace!”.   

    The Rabbi has a tricky request, rooted in the war two thousand miles away and   Jonny has no wish to be dragged in to another family drama, so gets clear as soon as he can get the car keys off his dad David, a kosher caterer just back from provisioning  miles away in Stoke Newington with his wife Lesley snarling “we risked our lives for a piece of fish!” . She plies Simon with tea , biscuits and macaroons till Ruth snaps “he’s a Rabbi,not a spaniel!” 

         I detail all this to emphasise how powerfully Craig draws us sharply into a particular community with a mosaic of tiny, often funny, references to past and present neighbours and events.   It may sometimes feel a bit cartoonishly Jewish-family but we need to feel its ordinariness to engage with the un-ordinariness of the tragic and politically edgy story.  The patriarch is Nicholas Woodeson,  a tiny ball of desperate energy wrapped in well-worn corduroy; Lesley is Tracy-Ann Oberman , her drop-dead  Jewish-mother timing and control masking – for a while – a crumbling fragility.  Ruth  — Dorothea `Myer-Bennett – is a cool young lawyer . They are all grieving: tomorrow is  the memorial service for the favourite son Danny,  whose  Israeli helicopter-gunship was shot down over Khan Younis.   But Ruth is fresh back from Geneva and a war-crimes investigation which  very much includes Israel’s conduct alongside Hamas’ atrocities, and Rabbi Simon came to warn them that some of the community will demonstrate against her being at the service. Old David, though,  wants her to deliver the eulogy, and her mother won’t even have her job spoken of.  Ruth’s “There are things happening in Gaza that shouldn’t be happening” is met with “I don’t want to hear about that evil thing in this house” .`

      But life has to go on, together the women lay the table for guest Saul , who might save the failing business by having them cater his daughter’s wedding. He is, as David cannily points out, a man with two more daughters, as well as being the synagogue chairman…

          I remembered it from 2010 as a sharp play, but today it hits twice as hard.   There is everyday comedy,  a solid  sense of the quotidian Englishness of this particular London community: none of it is their fault, and as David says of the local newsagent, “He’s a Waziristani Muslim and I’m an Ashkenazi Jew and every morning we talk about the weather”.    But it is also classically about two things:  how in families  stubborn  expectations can blur real love, and the immense issues of international morality , justice and the never-ending  plight of distant Israel surrounded by genocidal ambition. 

         It echoes Arthur Miller as it thickens and tenses through the second act , with David too desperate to get Saul to sign – a Willy Loman, on the edge –  and with the gradual revelation of certain responsibilities surrounding the dead pilot Danny, just as  in All My Sons.  A moment of angry debate, perhaps a shade too discursively op-ed, has Dan Fredenburgh’s Saul angrily confronting a smooth senior lawyer (Adrian Lukis), who arrives with a certain vital transcript to show to Ruth.  Through him it also makes the vital point, so bitterly hard on diaspora Jews far away, that while far more savage killings are perpetrated daily all across the globe, dwarfing the Gaza disaster and making mockery of international codes,  as a western-allied democracy Israel always gets “held to a higher standard..strip a country of dignity and you lose your own” says the lawyer. 

         But how fair is it to be Jewish today, far from Israel and feeling far from safe,  helplessly loyal to its right  to exist but blamed for it daily?   as Saul says  “we’re all seen as guilty, for wanting  to be safe…cosy England is a myth”.   Even in those late scenes the play is shot through with comedy alongside real emotion: how can it not be?  Humans are absurd as well as tragic.  When the lawyer suddenly spots the leftover macaroons on the table or the furious, under-loved Jonny takes an axe to his father’s naff new pillars ,  even in the tense tragic moment you  can laugh.  The Rosenbergs are trapped, like all of us but more paintfully, in  this miserable, inextricable angry rift within  the human family.   Woodeson’s final moments, with his daughter, are haunting.  So they should be.    

Menierchocolatefactory.com to 2 May

rating 4

A DARKNESS FROM THE PAST, WITH MODERN ECHOES 

         Fittingly in ou age of outing, condemnation and cancellation there have within a twelvemonth been three plays about the 17c Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins:  The Ungodly, A Tryal of Witches, and now this very classy adaptation by Ava Pickett of AK Blakemore’s book, The Manningtree Witches.  The latter two focus, as is normal and obvious now, on the appalling misogyny which picked on any woman who was single, eccentric, elderly, socially rebellious,  sharp-tongued and/or learned in female talents like midwifery and herbalism.  The women legally-murdered as witches areshown as courageous victims, the men dominant brutal bigots.   Especially Hopkins: in his brief terrible heyday he managed with legal help and the Biblical line “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”  to bring more “witches” to the gallows than had been condemned in the preceding 15 years.  

          It is good that writers are exploring what it was all about, the best of them trying to step back into that Cromwellian post-Reformation world of harsh, uncelebratory religiosity.   The first of the plays was Joanna Carrick’s remarkable THE UNGODLY (https://theatrecat.com/2023/10/27/the-ungodly-red-rose-chain-ipswich/) which toured to London and New York. That was  a small, domestic chamber piece set in a farmhouse where Hopkins is the shy, nervy, sexually anxious brother-in-law of a couple who repeatedly lose infants (not uncommon: it was a hardscrabble world in rural Essex).  They become followers, then feel a dawning doubt of sanity.    Carrick offers us young Hopkins’  development, even some explanation, which makes it horribly easy to think about modern bigotries in twisted angry young men (he died at 27). Today he’d either be an Islamist “martyr” , go about shouting “Punch a Terf!”, or be deep in the Andrew Tate Manosphere.  

           The second witch-hunt play I mentioned, Tryal of Witches, was less successful but musically interesting.  This one, however, is a skilfully written straight play with a big ensemble: we meet Hopkins first as a black-clad, striding figure arriving in the village, charismatic enough to dominate the local pastor and the scarce local men (the civil war is raging, there are many widows). It is framed by narration from Rebecca West (a real historic character, played with shrill sparkiness by Lucy Mangan) .  It was she who, imprisoned and in fear of her own life,   gave  made-up evidence about a coven including her tough mother Anne: she confronts the audience from the start with a scornful “What would you have f-ing done?”. 

      It’s a good question.  When a madness of belief grips those with power and hyou add  an undercurrent of puritanical sexual anger,  resistance by the weaker sex is futile. As Sam Mitchell’s stern, looming Hopkins says, “Satan dwells in dark moist places of the woods”: it’s not  hard to spot the male accusers’  anxious Freudian parallel with the dark moist places of women, when the accusers lay out helpless starving old Bess to examine her for a Satan’s mark (any mole will do).  

        The strength of the piece is in the ensemble: we are taken into the midst of a lively, sweary, gossipy group of women.  Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly is movement-director and  keeps them y  surging round the stage like shoaling fish  in a lively expression of community alliances, jokes and quarrels.  Gina Isaac is wonderful as Anne,  seen-it-all scornful and tough on her dreamy daughter,  yet  kind towards Fiona Branson’s  old Bess when she begs food.  One inter-family quarrel over a boy’s wasting bacon fishing for crabs (a lovely Essex rural touch) gives a foothold to Hopkins when the child dies.  So does a furious “pox upon you!” from old Bess, hungry and begging food.    Shout witchcraft, blame the noisy women, though heaven knows  though deaths were common in 1743 : as Anne says “hard lives in hard times. All we are is poor!”.  As to the law, more than once Rebecca observes that truth seems not to count, all that matters is “what’s written down”. Confessions, depositions, comfortable lies.

        Matthew Hopkins  is also, in this telling, particularly and personally obsessed with young Rebecca, which enables the play to be given an unhistoric brief coda after the hangings.  Unexpected, but something I found surprisingly satisfying.  Overall it is a gripping show,  well worth catching and fit for an afterlife,   its gruesomeness shot with humanity and pity.   And, from the past,  a reminder of  how quickly horrors  can surge back after seeming to fade .  And how in some still extant cultures years later  – need I even mention Afghanistan or Iran? – it is true, as Anne bitterly tells her daughter , that   “a woman’s skin is but a paper for a man to write on”.    

mercurytheatre.co.uk  to 14 march

rating 4 

1939:  GLOBAL MOMENT , INTIMATE PAIN

     There are some tremendous moments  in the last ten minutes of this late-period Arthur Miller play: some from Pearl Chanda as Sylvia,  some from Eli Gelb as her emotionally disintegrating husband Phillip and Alex Waldman as the doctor, Harry, who has been trying to heal her of “hysterical paralysis”.   It becomes a great complicated cry from the soul of the Jewish diaspora in 1930’s New York,  and equally one from the personal  distress of a marriage. 

      And at  this late point, leaning forward, gripped and driven along half a dozen tracks of thought, you can just about forgive it for certain  longeurs in the preceding 110 minutes (it’s two hours straight through , as it should be) .  And it’s worth it, because it is by Miller, to whom attention always should be paid,  directed by Jordan Fein who gave us that remarkable Fiddler on the Roof,  well cast and magnificently played and  – moreover – agonizingly topical towards our present global politics. 

       But brace yourself:  too much is talk, often circular, in dim lamplight and psychosexual confusion,  penned in a deep arena littered with newspapers and benches and a bed, where uninvolved characters stay trapped in corners.    Sylvia has suddenly been gripped with a genuine, but physically unattributable, inability to stand or walk.  It  is 1939 :   her shock paralysis seems to be rooted in horror at the newspaper pictures of Kristallnacht and the jeering, humiliating crowds laughing at old Jewish men forced to scrub the sidewalk with toothbrushes. Her great cry – late on in the play – is  “Where is America, where is England, youve gotta do something before they murder us all”.  

      Her husband is puzzled, a prim chap always in black, and before his disintegration with the smoothest of waxed partings.  He is proud of his job in mortgages but even more of his unseen son for going into the army – a Jew needn’t just be a lawyer, banker of businessman , and he himself  “doesnt run with the crowd, who says a Jes has to be a Democrat?”  Late on, when Dr Harry is challenging him, this attitude becomes clear as an attempt to  resist the otherness of being a Jew and “melt into the goyim”.   Phillip in his despair  about both Sylvia and a professional setback and implication from his boss that  Jews stick together against the mainstream,   wishes he had been a proper fulltime observant Jew in the comfort of  ritual and community.    He’s a lost soul: Miller is expressing something interesting here, a sort of parallel with Sylvia’s distress: what is  it to be Jewish? Why must we be?   

        He adores Sylvia, but has been pretty much impotent these twenty years, somthing he lies about to Dr Harry.  His wife’s collapse is overwhelming him to the point sometimes of violent anger; he cannot bring himself to understand why the events half a world away are so threatening to her, safe in NY.    Though there’s  also a sense that she has made Harry into that distant enemy (can’t help thinking of Sylvia Plath’s  terrifying poem about father or husband   as “a man in black with a Meinkampf look”: female sense of weakness, oppression) .   At one point Harry perceptively says “it’s like she’s connected to some wire that goes right around the world”. And maybe, more thoughts intruding,  this is so: perhaps some  spirits absorb and genuinely suffer , at distance, the sickness of the world.   Ideas spin out from the play even when you’re most frustrated with it, and indeed with Harry’s inappropriate own sexual feelings about the poor woman. 

     But I forgave Harry-the-character everything during his exasperated yelling at the collapsed Phillip near the end.  As a doctor, he points out, everybody who comes in thinks they’re  persecuted – by whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, protestants, catholics, whoever – and everyone’s scared,  “a newborn baby is not a picture of confidence”.  Yet somehow as they all kvetch – that glorious Yiddish word for complainting –  nobody admits they might be the ones doing the persecuting.   Back of the net, Miller!  a message for today.

      Another great line: Harry studied in Germany and loves its art and music,  and his own delusion is believing  that this  Nazism cannot last.  Challenged about everyone being persecuted he remarks that   Hitler feels it, and is a top kvetcher himself:  “He has turned his whole beautiful country into one gigantic kvetch”.

       For that line.  everything is forgiven.   Thank Arthur Miller for that insight.

youngvic.org  to 18th April 

A THOUGHTFUL ANGER

       We need to know and feel something beyond the daily global news; sometimes theatre can place us carefully and mercilessly in the room and try to make us understand the experiences of those caught up in war, and the  political forces sweeping over them.  Nearly twenty years ago Nicholas Kent did this by commissioning, collating and directing THE GREAT GAME about Afghanistan in a dayful of short plays.  Now, with five playwrights,  he does this in an evening for the recent history of Ukraine: that an ancient country long predating the Soviet empire, whose heroic struggle has made Britain fky yellow-and-blue flags these four years in windows and along country roads. We need to know  and feel it.

      The feeling begins immediately, and runs between each play,  as it’s framed by Mariia Petrovska  perched overhead playing the traditional 65-string bandura and singing the songs of sadness and of protest which she learned growing up in Mariupol.   It’s a moving and elegant way to link the plays,  all set since the collapse of the USSR , with the country’s far older history from Tsars to Stalin.  There is no attempt at exoticism and the six actors sound English, recognizable: David Michaels, Ian Bonar, Daniel Betts, Jade Williams, Clara Read and Sally Giles sharply versatile.

       The first play,  by Jonathan Myerson, takes us to something familiar: the early 1990s, a referendum for independence, demonstrations in Maidan Square and repression as Yanukovic tried to “balance” a relationship with Russia.  In a hotel room a couple – he collaborative, she fired with their son’s dream of a New Ukraine –  worry about him down in the square. But the breakfast trolley that enters is full of guns, manned by two pro-Kremlin snipers ready for massacre.  The father’s conviction that they only fire “over their heads” is gradually shattered by savage volleys.  Given their phone, do they warn their boy, or give him up to ‘build a future?”.  Bleakly classic. 

        Next comes David Edgar’s Five Day War, set in a hunting-lodge, a puppet government preparing to move in:  it’s clever, discursive, a sly portrait of ambition and political manoeuvring,  and also an acknowledgement of the Russian conviction, or downright lie, that what the Special Military Operation  really aims at is just a limited action to ‘protect”, “de-nazify, de-militarize” and modernize the country.  Being political it is, unfortunately, the least gripping.  Political wannabes do not after all spark sympathy.   Interesting is the general contempt they express for “a little Jewish comic’ – Zelensky.  

     After the interval come three more, each in their way devastating.  Natalka Vorozhbit (translated by Sasha Dugdale) gives us, against the relentless sound of bombs, a  tremendous monologue by Ian Bonar as a young man, unable to sleep, thinking about his best friends.  He is of conscription age but didn’t sign up, feels “hunted down” now, but both afraid and ashamed.  One friend has fled expensively to Vienna and texts him jokey messages about ski-ing.  Another is in the front line, maybe dead already.  His girlfriend is safe in the UK but he is wretched without her, alone with his thoughts and fears and self disgust.  Bonar’s performance is extraordinary, and Vorozhbit’s last line draws us straight in, with a reminder that we are safe behind the lines but not necessarily forever.“Thank you” says the young man “for the honour of battling to fight off Russia. Why us? “

      David Greig takes us next right to that front line, a battered primary school classroom in East Ukraine, where two soldiers, tired and hungry and only just hoping, notice a body in the corner: one of the Koreans.   He has a paper of useful phrases “Please – thank you – drop your weapon – cigarettes”. They take the cigarettes.  But their Sergeant appears, notes that the man is still just alive. The question is whether as they get themselves out they will take him.  Sarge says yes “No exception, evacuate  the wounded”. Taking that burden will probably kill them all but “What are you fighting for?’ “Ukraine” “What is Ukraine? At this moment Ukraine is the idea that freedom can be chosen. Right is right. The consquence of a right action is not our concern.  In the dark place where only soldiers go, honour is the light that guides you home. I will not quench that light”. 

        And so , with another poignant song from Petrovska overhead, we get to the last play, Cat Goscovitch’s portrait of the most unnerving of Putin’s war crimes: the kidnap of Ukrainian children for “Russification” , adoption and training.  20,000 of them over the last four years.  Some have been able to be reclaimed, but at what cost to all?  It’s short, devastating, horribly relatable when the now-teenage child returns, different.  

      So that’s it: Ukraine Unbroken, an extraordinary evening.  

arcolatheatre.com to 28th March