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Rose
Park Theatre
London
MAUREEN LIPMAN is the perfect actress for Martin Sherman’s outstanding monologue. Her two-and-a-half-hour narrative is a powerfully captivating account of Rose, an 80-year old Jewish woman and her journey through some of the harrowing events of the 20th century.
Sat on a bench throughout the show, honouring the Jewish tradition of mourning for a close relative’s death (shivah), Rose’s personality, sense of humour and her remarkable life story engage the audience from the outset.
Her epic journey from a Russian Ukrainian village childhood to survival in the Warsaw ghetto, British rejection from Palestine and a financially successful if emotionally damaged married life in US with reflections on her troubled son’s life in an Israel that no longer recognises her relevance, has recurring echoes throughout.
Lipman brings a warmth and a vitality to the performance so that agnostic Rose’s reflections on being Jewish, her life and God blend tragedy with humour, astute observation with traumatic emotions and a sense of a distressingly eventful life coming to an end without resolution, blown like the tumbleweed she finds so intriguing in US films.
Rose compares her occasionally blurred memories to a hallucinatory LSD trip where filmic representations intermingle with true-life events and brutality and humanity co-exist without rhyme or reason and the most enduring lesson she has learnt is that every experience can be judged in contrary ways.
The performance runs well over time and needs some tightening up, but could well suffer if Lipman was to accelerate her thoughtful and personable delivery.
The faltering sections of the monologue peppered with pills and sips of water add to its effectiveness. This is not a narrative that should be rushed and the asides on health give time for audience reflection, a natural caesura to Rose’s vivid experiences.
Although set around the millennium and detailing events from the 20th century many of Rose’s graphic experiences of war and life as an immigrant are horrifyingly contemporary.
Her amusingly sardonic reflections sound like throwaway lines but usually reflect the most profound of judgements and Lipman’s exceptional performance is able to give Sherman’s memorable creation the life force she deserves.
Runs until October 15, box office: parktheatre.co.uk
