Bravura and inspirational performance -
I finally got to see Rose at the Ambassador’s Theatre.
Maureen Lipman (Dame Maureen to you) holds the stage in this revival of the 1999 National Theatre production for 2 and a half hours (165 minutes with interval) as she channels Rose, a Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivor.
The first half takes Rose from a 1920s Ukrainian shtetl, via the Warsaw Ghetto to one of the survivor ships to Palestine (The Exodus 1947 – renamed from the SS President Warfield) turned back by the British.
The second half takes her to the US and, on occasions, back to Israel and to 1999, the dawn of a new Millennium.
The script (which is only slightly ahistorical) is (as you might imagine, and particularly in the first half) somewhat gruelling, but it is also written with a humour that Lipman is extraordinarily capable of wringing dry. The second half faces squarely up to the moral problems the new Israel had, even as early as the 1990s with their position in Palestine, and the problems particularly that some Holocaust survivors may have with this.
The play is a fiction (with a strong narrative arc, unlike real life), but one based on the real life story of Martin Sherman’s grandmother. It has been playing across the country (it’s 6 weeks at the Ambassador) and it is a bravura performance, welcomed by the standing audience tonight, although I suspect we stood also for the story told.
Well worth seeing, if you can.