An unmissable tour-de-force from Dame Maureen Lipman in Martin Sherman’s beautifully written drama

Martin Sherman’s one-woman play originally premiered in 1999 at the National Theatre with Olympia Dukakis as Rose, looking back to the old century as the new Millennium waited in the wings.

Sherman, justly celebrated American Jewish writer and long-time resident of London, is perhaps best known for Bent, the powerful two-hander exploring the fate of gay men as the Nazis rose to power, which premiered in London in 1979, with Ian McKellen and Tom Bell in the central roles. With Rose he returns to Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and no spoiler alert is necessary to reveal Rose as a survivor of Nazism and more.

This revival, first seen onscreen filmed for Sky Arts earlier this year, then onstage at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre and now at London’s intimate Park Theatre, is a triumph for all involved.

I call it a play rather than a monologue for, with Dame Maureen Lipman’s extraordinary performance we, the audience, are cast as her confidants from the shockingly graphic opening words. Octogenarian and wandering Jewess Rose describes the casual murder of a young girl whose identity we will discover as the play progresses. “She laughed. And then she blew her nose. She had a cold. The bullet struck her forehead. It caught her in the middle of a thought.”

Rose explains she is “sitting shivah”: the traditional Jewish custom after a death, when the mourners, who are seated on low (often too hard for comfort) chairs, are visited by friends, relatives and well-wishers, often chatting long into the evening after the prayers for the deceased. This is, I think, why the idea of the audience as confidants works so naturally.

On a wooden bench, centre-stage, sits Lipman, warmly lit and dressed with elegant though comfortable formality. Beside her is a glass of water – a prop to which she refers as a vital necessity, for the drinks that she takes (and indeed the ice-cream she eats with her medicine) are part of the action.

Julian Starr’s evocative soundscape plays its part in evoking the stages of Rose’s often painful odyssey across continents and through time, space, and multiple ‘re-incarnations’ as daughter, lover, wife, mother and, at last, grandmother. Rose transforms from the child of a roadside fruit-seller in a Ukrainian Shtetl to a young woman walking the streets of Nazi-occupied Warsaw; from a would-be immigrant sailing towards Palestine on the ill-fated ship Exodus, to a successful immigrant to the USA, where she becomes a hotelier whose properties morph into homes for the elderly.

Director Scott Le Crass and his design team (David Shields, set and costume, clearly working closely with lighting designer Jane Lalljee), wisely keep it simple, well aware of the power of the complementary team of Sherman’s writing as interpreted by Lipman.

It is clear that Sherman delights in expressing the eccentricities of Jewish culture – from how the hardness of the shivah bench “reminds you that you belong to a people, a race, a culture of sore behinds and complainers and heated discussions, of minds in turmoil … flight ... exploding like the atom …” – to mystical notions such as the idea of the dybbuk, the soul of the departed taking over the body of the living.

Lipman excels at communicating with self-deprecating humour to leaven the more difficult moments. As the play progresses, we understand that the Rose who sits before us is mourning more than one death.

Through the experiences of Rose’s children and grandchildren, Sherman adds extra layers, often intensely discomfiting, when her son and his wife “make Aliyah” (immigrate) to Israel. There are not only cultural fractures as, in their efforts to be modern Israelis, the younger generations deliberately abandon the Yiddish history and culture that has shaped Rose’s life, but also political ones when family members articulate widely different views about the settler movement and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leading to a dramatic climax.

At last Rose gets to take the weight off that sore bottom as Lipman rises to receive applause: a well-deserved standing ovation on press night.

By Judi Herman

Header photo by Pamela Raith

Rose runs until Saturday 15 October. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 3pm (Sat only). £32.50 (£16.50 concs). Park Theatre, N4 3JP. parktheatre.co.uk