One topic only this week and that is Yentl, the thrilling adaptation and dynamic experience at the on-side Marylebone Theatre on Euston Road. The show is adapted from the original short story by the wonderful, witty and mercurial Isaac Bashevis Singer. It bears as much resemblance to the film version, written – under the powerful, unpredictable hand of Barbra Streisand – by my late husband Jack Rosenthal, as brisket on rye does to boeuf bourguignon.
As far as I can divine, our friends at The Guardian have not reviewed the play, although they gave it a rave when it opened in Australia. Nor has The Telegraph bothered yet. The Times gave it a grudging and ludicrous two stars. Well, I would have given it ten firmaments. I sent an outraged letter to The Times, begging them to keep their critic away from my next first night, to which, curiously enough, I had no reply. Watch this space.
The film Yentl was, in its way, a masterpiece of kitsch and charisma, and saying Ms Streisand did the full portion, as producer, director, co-writer and cross-dressing star, is an understatement. But the play, conceived and directed by Australia’s Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, is a masterpiece. You will not see its like again. And it is partly in Yiddish, with subtitles. I can’t remember being so excited sitting in a theatre – lips parted like a child, barely breathing. I even forgot the discomfort of the seats and the warmth of the interval ice cream.
There is a lot of Jewish drama around these days you will have noticed. Good ones, bad ones, remembered ones, forgotten ones. Alongside, you may also have noticed a growing welter of good old-fashioned antisemitism. It is as though the zeitgeist wants us preserved, pickled or on display, like a theme park.
It reminds me of the synagogue I visited for my DNA Roots programme, in Kazimiert Dolny in Poland. It only opens for a few days a year. There is a bimah but no seats. For whom? There were no Jews there any more so it was kept, beautifully pickled in brine, for, I suppose, non-Jews and tourists.
It also makes me reflect on the Polanski film The Pianist, in which I appeared, where hundreds of gentile extras sat in the Umschlagplatz, waiting to be deported, because there were no authentic Jewish ones.
Some dramas are appropriating our experiences but without grounding us in history. Hampstead Theatre specialises in minor Jewish plays. Leopoldstadt was called “Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List”. The Royal Court’s Giant gave us a not unattractive monster in Roald Dahl, and The Holy Rosenbergs is reminiscent of Arnold Wesker’s 1956 play Chicken Soup with Barley, with an updated Gaza/UN polemic.
The Jews are mostly very emotional and the non-Jews very rational. In the words of Stoppard, “Why do Jews have to choose between pushy and humble?”
I remember the pages of this paper, when Jack Rosenthal’s Barmitzvah Boy came out in 1976, showed an affronted butcher from Golders Green complaining bitterly that it was terrible to show Jews in a bad light. At the time we were amused. After all, rightly or wrongly, we felt very accepted and safe in 1976 and the play was Jack’s way of talking about the rights of passage from childhood to manhood therefore, surely, a barmitzvah was the perfect metaphor for judging if “this is a man”.
We thought that the characters were dealt with affection and humour. Now I’m not so sure I’m not on the butcher’s side. After all, when outsiders in the diaspora believe they are accepted or assimilated, it may be naive to think that they can be allowed to exhibit the same foibles and failures as regular citizens and not, eventually, be despised for them.
In a panel on Sunday, before my second viewing of Yentl the play, Allan Corduner, who featured in Yentl the film, and myself, widow of Jack, talked of our Streisand experiences. Allan’s were mostly good, Jack’s more painful. Apparently, on Streisand’s first day of the read-through of the script, Harold Goldblatt, the elderly actor playing the rabbi, stood up from the table, started to speak, then suddenly keeled over and died. It was quite terrible. It was also very Isaac Bashevis Singer.
As Singer’s granddaughter told us during the panel discussion on video from Israel, he was imbued with superstition and what he called “private mysticism”. Yentl, the yeshivah bocher, was loosely based on his own mother, Bathsheba, who was the daughter of a rabbi and, in her way, very learned. All three of her children became successful writers.
This stage version of the story of a young woman – alone in the world of 18th-century Poland and so desperate to study Torah that she commits the heinous crime of assuming male identity – makes the play especially relevant in this gender-obsessed society. Where this production wins out on others is that it is a somewhat stylised creation, like a Commedia dell’ Arte experience, using nothing but a ladder, a curtain and a table, physical dexterity, honesty and simple authentic costumes, to draw and seduce you into their world.
The four actors are sublime. Evelyn Krape as the shape-shifting “Yeytser Ho’ra” or narrator, guides us through the twists and turns of the play. Like a Joel Grey compère, wrought with mischief. It is as though the show is lit from within the actors. I won’t dwell upon the brilliance of script, lighting, sound and direction, because you have a theatre critic on board for that. Suffice to say that the final tableau had hot tears shooting from my eyes. Five minutes later, the actors, in their jeans and sneakers, with scrubbed-clean faces and water bottles, did a thoughtful and modest Q&A.
Sometimes, I am so in love with my fellow professionals. The words of Confucius come to mind: “If you find a vocation you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.” All this on the day of the Oscars with all that improbable, camped-up carnival.
I have just enough space left to tell you what a London cabbie told my cousin Simon today when he found out we were related: “She told a very funny story on the radio once, about her mother,” he said. “Auntie Zelma?” said Simon, kvelling, because we all love a Zelma story.
“Apparently,” continued the cabbie, quoting something I had long forgotten, “they were walking down the high street when her mother stopped and said: ‘Ooh, I didn’t know they had restaurants for lesbians in London.’
‘So,’ Maureen said… ‘what do you mean?’ Then she looked up at the restaurant and said; ‘No mum, it’s not a restaurant for lesbians. It’s a Lebanese restaurant.’”
The thing I love about that story is that it feels like a message from her. And the message signals some kind of immortality…or as Singer might have called it, Netsikhes.
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