Last December Australian actor Amy Hack was riding high. She had recently starred in an acclaimed, award-winning stage adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl, a shtetl-set tale of a young woman who, forbidden by Orthodox Jewish law from studying the Torah, disguises herself as a man.
The sold-out show performed at Sydney Opera House, among other venues. And so it was that on one evening last December, still brimful of the acclaim she received for Yentl – and now looking forward to the London transfer of the production – that Hack was performing in a seasonal show during the run-up to Christmas. As she sang the Spanish song Feliz Navidad news began to reach her audience about something happening ten minutes’ drive away on Bondi Beach.
“It was all very surreal,” says the Melbourne-raised performer, speaking to me from her Sydney home before travelling to London where Yentl opens this week at Marylebone Theatre.
“There were Jewish people in the audience and information started dripping in. It was kind of like a livefeed.”
As she recalls the attack on Sydney’s Jewish community in which 15 people were massacred and 40 injured during Australia’s worst mass shooting in decades, the articulate Hack struggles to find the words to describe what happened.
“I don’t live in a particularly Jewish community area in Sydney but I feel like I can speak for a lot of us. It has affected us very deeply. It has totally destabilised our sense of safety and security.”
Hack went to the vigil a couple of days later. “The beach was still the beach. The bridge was still the bridge. People were still able to eat burgers, laugh and hug. It was as if there had been some surreal blip in reality during which this horrific unimaginable terror erupts.”
“Reality” has thankfully reasserted itself in Hack’s life. She has just got home from a concert of Barbra Streisand songs. “I’m in total admiration of her. She’s astonishing. But I haven’t gorged on her version of Yentl because I don’t want to be too influenced by that.”
Whereas Streisand leant into Singer’s story from a feminist perspective, Hack’s show reconnects with its “darker, more transgressive roots”. as director Gary Abrahams describes it. Abrahams is also the executive director of the Melbourne-based theatre company, Kadimah Yiddish Theatre (KYT), which is producing the show. It staged its first production in 1925 and is the oldest theatre company in Australia. Today it is the only contemporary bilingual Yiddish-English theatre company in Australia. For Hack there are parallels between her and Singer’s character. “I guess personality wise we’re both very curious, intensely fascinated with the world and humanity and not entirely satisfied with what we know. And that can sometimes get us into trouble.”
A clue to Hack’s approach to playing Yentl is that when she refers to her protagonist she uses the pronouns “they and them”
“I know that Barbra Streisand’s interpretation was that Yentl was a woman. But having dug into the character my determination is that they are someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female.”
Hack points to evidence that Yentl does not align “one way or another”. For instance in Singer’s book Yentl is told by her father that she has the soul of a man.
“There are references to Yentl being made in made in God’s image, where God is a kind of genderless plural entity,” says Hack, who herself uses she/her pronouns.
“In my opinion a lack of binary-ness is an inherent part of who Yentl is rather than them just being a woman who wants what men have.
Hack was raised “learning a little a Hebrew” but before she took on the role of Yentl she was not a Yiddish speaker. Though she remembers her grandparents, who emigrated to South Africa from Latvia and Lithuania, speaking the language. And her mother speaks a little.
“It’s very satisfying knowing that your ancestors and grandparents spoke the language in an entirely different context. They were doing it in the shtetl. I was doing it at the Sydney Opera House.”
What fascinates Hack is the way Singer explores the culture of the shtetl – the men and boys in yeshivas who pore over Talmud and are hunched over rabbinical commentary to answer elusive questions about what God wants for us. Or why do we have desires. Hack is “proud” to be in a show that does all this in a country where “Jewish culture isn’t highly represented in Australian mainstream culture”.
Yet this is not the easiest time to be telling Jewish stories, acknowledges the actor. “Because of all the horrible stuff going on in the Middle East I think, whether consciously or unconsciously, a lot of misdirected anger discourages support for Jewish stories.
"It shouldn’t – because Yentl is not a story that takes any political stance about the Middle East.”
Where the play is political is in the way it deals with identity and gender, says Hack. Particularly in the way it addresses those who come from cultures and religions that segregate on lines of gender.
“It’s also like a very progressive, modern, universal story,” says the actor. A lot of people who have seen it from the trans community and from the queer community, have been very affected by it and felt very much that Yentl is their story too.
"So while I think it is set in this particular shtetl, in this particular Jewish context, Yentl isn’t solely a Jewish story.”
Hack also feels the show can also bridge the divides that plague 21st century life.
“We’re not having proper human discourse or even sharing space with people often enough. What theatre is so good at is showing people how isolated and damaged we’ve become by being keyboard warriors. A Jew, is a Muslim, is a Christian is a Buddhist. We’re all so much more than just the labels placed on us.”
Yentl is at the Marylebone Theatre until April 12
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