Middle East Conflict Hits Edgware in New Play

The Holy Rosenbergs (Menier Chocolate Factory, London)

Verdict: Suburban stand-off

Rating:

A debate on the Middle East conflict over tea and marble cake in the front room of a suburban-semi in the London borough of Edgware was never going to set the world to rights.

But Lindsay Posner’s seamless revival of Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs does at least capture the moral confusion of our times.

First seen at the National Theatre in 2011, it’s the story of a family of Jewish kosher caterers, on the eve of a memorial service for their beloved son Danny, who has been killed in action while flying an gunship over Gaza.

Dad David (Nicholas Woodeson) is so determined to be a pillar of the community that he’s erected two actual pillars either side of his front door.

His desire to see Danny honoured by his neighbours at the memorial has been dealt a blow by his daughter Ruth (a forensically intense Dorothea Myer-Bennett), whose work as a lawyer exposing Israeli war crimes has triggered bitter local protests.

Craig’s play boldly goes into battle on a set of carefully studied suburban chintz.

Also wading into the fray are a young Rabbi, the synagogue chairman, and a human rights lawyer who happens to swing by (the always ermine Adrian Lukis).

Meanwhile, a luxuriantly coiffured Tracy-Ann Oberman, as mum Lesley, lays on the nosh.

As the would-be alpha papa, Woodeson is a little too cuddly (and, at 76, a little too senior); but he brings warmth to his fractious relationship with his youthful looking wife.

Myer-Bennett raises the stakes as the emotionally charged Ruth; while lofty Lukis oozes condescension as Sir Stephen Crossley QC.

Despite moments of sardonic mirth, we are left exhausted by circular arguments and competing claims of righteousness and victimhood.

That, though, is Craig’s point, in a play that emulates Arthur Miller’s classic All My Sons: internecine blether begets only anger and impotence.

The Holy Rosenbergs is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory until  May 2. 

Yentl (Marylebone Theatre, London)

Verdict: Babs turns Grimm

Rating:

Forget Barbra Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl, which the story’s author Isaac Bashevis Singer openly belittled – in particular, the Hollywood ending featuring Babs crooning aboard a ship bound for America, and freedom.

Australia’s Kadimah Yiddish Theatre’s version is closer to Singer’s original: a rustic folk tale that’s a cross between the Brothers Grimm and a sex farce.

The challenge is how long to hold off before revealing the identity of Yentl (Amy Hack), after she runs away to the men-only world of a Rabbi school or ‘yeshiva’.

Here, she hopes to discover ‘the divine androgyny of the human soul’ promised by Judaism’s sacred Torah text.

But to avoid being rumbled she must dodge the lustful longings of her yeshiva friend Avigdor (Ashley Margolis) and small town beauty Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford).

Stylistically, Gary Abrahams’ production takes us back to the East European roots of Jewish theatre. Actors speak some Yiddish (with surtitles), and wear white face paint in an elemental arena of wood chip, stone and tufts of grass – racier moments dimly lit behind a rough muslin curtain.

Hack is driven by her childlike desire to learn, while tiptoeing around religious regulations. Margolis adds a strongly carnal flavour as the priapic Avigdor, who never twigs Yentl’s gender; while Kingsford brings dignity and urgency to Hodes.

Evelyn Krape, as an Earth Mother chorus figure, also acts as Yentl’s conscience while wearing a ram’s horn headdress – lending a feel of mythological timelessness.

Always threatening to be over-blown, it stays grounded thanks to the old-fashioned binaries of traditional kosher culture.

Yentl runs at the Marylebone Theatre until April 12. 

PATRICK MARMION

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The Mesmerist (Palace Theatre, Watford)

Verdict: Spellbinding

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Who knows what’s real and what’s not, in Rufus Hound’s one-man (plus audience assistance) magic show.

Officially, it’s a recreation of an undocumented, one-off performance of mystery and mesmerism performed at Watford’s Palace Theatre by his would-be magician grandfather in 1983.

The artfully amateurish spectacle includes Hound escaping from handcuffs, guessing audience secrets posted in sealed envelopes, levitating a table with the help (and fingertips) of six volunteers and, perhaps most impressively, hypnotising one member of the audience – and ‘sawing’ another in half.

I myself was volunteered (randomly, I’m assured) to assist in a series of acts, including having my mind read by the aforementioned mesmerised woman, who was then taken ill and lead away by a stage hand. (Not an effect I’m accustomed to having on members of the opposite sex, I admit.)

Hound is no slick Derren Brown; and he could do with more of a soundtrack to support a performance amiably directed by Steve Marmion (no known relation). I could also have done without the needlessly dark finale.

But it’s an undeniably fun evening. Give your critical faculties a break and get spellbound.

Until March 21

PATRICK MARMION 

Manic Street Creature (Kiln Theatre, London)

Verdict: Setting the house on fire

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‘I can set this house on fire,’ sings Maimuna Memon’s Ria, blazing with the kind of passion you might expect of a gutsy girl from the north who has come to London’s happening Camden Town to make her way as a singer-songwriter.

And Memon proceeds to do just that, setting the theatre alight (metaphorically!) as she relives Ria’s tale with scorching, heartfelt passion.

Herself a fabulous talented Lancashire girl who has won awards for various musical-theatre performances, Memon is the heart and soul of this semi-autobiographical piece. She wrote the book, and the music – and as if that wasn’t enough, she narrates... and sings her folksy, poetic, intense, soul-baring ballads. Sensationally.

Think Carole King. Add many guitars and tears.

Shaped as a recording session (unnecessarily, even intrusively) with Ria and her band making an album, each song pushes the story forward.

Ria gets the hang of Camden, falls in love with the first bloke who’s nice to her and they make sweet music together.

Then Dan goes AWOL.

What begins ordinary and conventional becomes extraordinary and original as Ria shares the experience of loving a man diagnosed as bipolar, ‘sedated by synthetic serotonin’, physically present but emotionally absent.

For this young woman, whose manic-depressive father abandoned her, it’s history repeating itself. Cue ‘Absent father, absent lover, don’t hurt another’.

There’s a very funny moment when they are performing in a cat café (!) and Dan, pumped with Peroni, won’t let go of Belinda the Russian blue and whirls and whirls until she flies off his shoulder. In a searing image, possibly unintentional, a bank of orange lights resembles a blister pack of tablets and an electric guitar squeals like a siren.

Ria does everything she can to make things better, but at what cost. ‘Someone else’s trauma can be traumatising,’ she confesses. ‘How long does it take for a cracked window to shatter?’ Worry not: Memon’s soul music could soothe even a splintered heart.

Manic Street Creature runs at the Kiln until March 28.

GEORGINA BROWN