A devastating, exquisitely realised piece of storytelling reflecting on the events of the 20th century, laden with warmth and humour, and sparking provocative questions on what it means to remember – a must see.
Written by Martin Sherman and directed by Scott Le Crass, Rose opens with a gentle spotlight on David Shield’s minimalist set: the clean lines of a yellow mat atop a wooden bench, a blue notebook, a blue coolbox, a bottle of water and a glass. Rose is sitting Shiva, the week-long Jewish mourning rite, although it is initially ambiguous for whom – or what – she is mourning.
She takes the opportunity to talk, recounting her life for us over the next two hours. ‘I am eighty five. I find that unforgivable’, laments Rose, to great laughter from the audience. At eighty five, Rose is an infectiously charismatic, poised raconteur, unafraid to muse with verve and humour on a heady mix of themes, from sex and menstruation to religious renouncement, pagan ritual and kabbalah.
She talks of her early days in a Ukrainian shtetl, remembering a time of carts and horses pounding the streets – ‘traffic, but no exhaust fumes’ – a time when ‘we still had an ozone layer…someone should have told us, we could have enjoyed it’. Rose presents her younger self as a precocious, intellectually hungry child, ‘pretentious in several languages at once’, her thirst for knowledge prompting long, forbidden conversations with her brother late into the night, and an indignation at her inability to attend school on account of her gender.
The play strongly resists tropes of neat storytelling – ‘nothing was linear’, Rose recalls of her time hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw’s sewers. ‘I don’t want to remember. What can I tell you? We lived happily ever after’. Fairytale endings elude this narrative; she quips that ‘when you experience your first period and your first pogrom in the same month, you can safely say your childhood is over’ – though somewhat humorously, Rose can’t be sure if her memories of that first pogrom are in fact lifted from Fiddler on the Roof. Later, she tells us she can see the sign on a boat headed for Palestine, large letters designating ‘Exodus 1947’, so clearly in her mind – but acknowledges she was standing directly underneath it, so how could she? After Rose is detained by American soldiers and bundled onto a train heading for a displaced persons camp, she is encouraged to jump off by a sailor she has recently met, soon to become her second husband. The train, the lovers, and the steam spilling across the platform; hadn’t she seen this scene a hundred times in the movies?
Questions surrounding the unreliability of memory, as well as the relationships between fiction and reality, the past and present are explored throughout the play. Rose’s spiritual experiences and trauma-induced hallucinations, as well as the burnt, washed-out scenes of her beloved Western films blur with vivid visual memories. All are presented to us with equal significance in an exquisite tapestry of oral testimony. One of Rose’s grandchildren eventually becomes a film editor in LA, showing her how to cut and rearrange the reels – ‘my hallucinations were not unusual’, she muses, ‘it was just the movies catching up with the mind’.
Dame Maureen Lipman is mesmerising as the titular Rose in this one-woman play. One of the problems faced by such productions is the struggle to hold an audience’s attention, exacerbated in an age of big-budget streaming services and 4D cinema. It is safe to say Lipman has us unequivocally in the palm of her hand throughout, hanging on to her every word in a trance-like state. She speaks with a natural parataxis, a rhythmic beat given to our instincts for storytelling and meaning-making through narrative that verges on the biblical, builds her memories steadily, and irresistibly pulls us into her world. Rose’s testimony is deeply affecting without ever becoming sentimental, her most traumatic memories and deepest longings told with a direct, matter of fact simplicity. She surprises and moves us, effecting a kind of emotional whiplash as she switches from recounting her trials within the ghetto in Warsaw to musing on a quotidian observation, or telling a joke.
Razor-sharp, recognisably Jewish humour is weaved throughout, with Rose aware of the irony of eating ice cream to take a cholesterol pill, and telling us God is like a policeman – ‘he’s never there when you need him, and then he punishes you when you haven’t done anything’. The clumsy American sailor slips on the escape boat, producing an unexpected visceral reaction in her – her body heaves and convulses, and strange sounds erupt from her throat; she’d forgotten what laughter was, which here becomes a corporal symbol of freedom, resistance and survival.
Jane Lalljee’s lighting design is hypnotic, bathing our storyteller in soft colours that complement her often dream-like verbal wanderings. Julian Starr’s simple soundscapes help to sketch the outlines of Rose’s life stories, such as the far-off cheering of crowds gathered to watch a Miss America pageant, in a particularly surreal recollection of Rose’s attempt to become possessed by the spirit of Yussell, her dead lover.
The themes of belonging and its antithesis, outsiderhood, perhaps resonate most strongly across the script. Persecuted throughout her early life, Rose’s son greets her as an old woman at the airport in Tel Aviv, saying ‘welcome home, Mama’: Palestine was no longer Palestine, but Israel, the promised land of milk and honey. Yet for Rose, the milk has gone sour, the honey is tart. Abby thinks her world, the culture of the old country is dead, that there is only the future. He calls her an outsider by choice. As Rose sings in Yiddish at the play’s close, it is that question which rings out and haunts the theatre – where do I belong?
Rose runs at the Park Theatre until 15th October.