[title]
Solomon Mikhoels, the great Yiddish actor, had the good fortune to come of age in revolutionary Russia and the ill luck to survive into the post-revolutionary hellhole that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, founded with such optimism and ambition in 1919, was shut down in 1948 – the same year that Mikhoels, its director and star, was murdered, his death made to look like an accident.
As Mikhoels, Darrell D’Silva charms, cajoles and bosses his little pack of acolytes – cuckolded husbands, unrequited lovers, NKVD shills, mouthy drunks and pretty blondes – from glory in Weimar Berlin to paranoia in Moscow, although it’s hardly paranoia when they certainly are out to get you. Artistic egos ricochet round the unimaginative set as apparatchiks hover, checking every scripted word and motion for hidden subversion, but there’s celebration (and lots of vodka and sex) amid the Soviet scrutiny, their Glorious Leader making Solomon laugh, too – for a while, anyway.
It’s watchable, but what’s missing is art. There’s no real sense of this incredible theatrical moment, in which Jewish culture flowered in the mud of anti-Semitism, or of the terror that followed; no space for subtlety, or the stretch and play of imagination, within David Schneider’s schoolteacherly text, and Matthew Lloyd’s humdrum direction can’t conceal the lack of anything to hide. It’s surely unintended irony, but Schneider has written a play about artistic repression that would satisfy Stalin. Nina Caplan