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'The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk' plays Wilton's Music Hall in early 2018. This review is from its 2016 run at Shakespeare's Globe
Bella and Marc were so in love that they flew: across his canvases, and through her memoirs of their young days in the Russian town of Vitebsk. Kneehigh’s unabashedly romantic, totally adorable play is inspired by the imaginative language that the artist Marc Chagall shared with his wife, Bella.
They were flying in more ways that one: Marc and Bella were escaping from anti-Semitism in first Russia, then France and Nazi Germany. But Daniel Jamieson’s play is written entirely from inside their heads, tinting the bleak events outside their relationship in warm shades of rosy pink and gold. Sophia Clist’s design fills the Globe’s indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse with a tangle of angled wooden beams, and ropes for Marc and Bella to hang off in swoony, dreamlike poses. In the gallery above them, their romance is accompanied by a live band that switches from heartstring-tugging 1940s jazz smoothies to the string-tugging energy of Klezmer fiddle.
When they first meet, she’s the daughter of a rich shop owner, full of dreams of becoming an actress or a writer. But the appearance of a certain mop-headed artist puts all that on hold. They cavort like mimes in black and white, in a madcap love affair that’s coloured with all the richness of Vitebsk’s Jewish community.
Marc Antolin’s Chagall is a compelling creation. He’s childlike, with a kind of Charlie Chaplin chaotic charisma. And he’s willing to let Bella pour her whole life into his, because he doesn’t really see her as a separate person. Audrey Brisson plays her with a mixture of delicacy and desperate intensity, pouring out unbearably sweet love songs to Marc – even after he leaves her alone with their new baby for four days to prepare for an art exhibition.
Jamieson’s text offers only the loosest of sketches of how the couple managed to escape first the artistic repression of newly communist Russia, then Nazism in Europe – armed only with their considerable charm, her dad’s money and his knack with a paintbrush.
But this missing context is made up for by the poignancy of the play’s memorialisation of Vitebsk’s lost Jewish community. Director Emma Rice played Bella herself in the first production of ‘The Flying Lovers…’ in the early ’90s – and her revival has folded an extra layer of emotional depth into Kneehigh’s tissue-wrapped play. Twenty years on, it’s a soaring, swooping crowd-pleaser, with just enough of Chagall’s featherweight eccentricity to escape mawkishness.