Show: Indecent
Society: London (professional shows)
Venue: Menier Chocolate Factory. 53 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU
Credits: by Paula Vogel. Music by Lisa Gutkin & Aaron Halva. Presented in association with Daryl Roth, Elizabeth I. McCann and Cody Lassen
Type: Sardines
Author: Susan Elkin
Performance Date: 13/09/2021
Indecent
Susan Elkin | 15 Sep 2021 16:23pm
As a play about a play with underlying tensions Paula Vogel’s play reminds me very much of Our Country’s Good although the issues are completely different. Originally planned for the spring of last year this production is the European debut of a play which has already won a Tony Award in the USA.
In 1907 Sholem Asch’s Yiddish play God of Vengeance, although castigated by some, is well received in St Petersburg and Moscow and then in New York. It is about a prosperous brothel keeper who wants to find a good match for his ‘virginal’ daughter. In fact she falls in love with one the prostitutes downstairs and the play includes a very emotional Lesbian love scene between the two women. Tightening censorship laws in America during the 1920s mean that the play can only be staged without that scene and in 1923 the company is charged with obscenity and found guilty although that is overturned on appeal. Later in the 1940s, the play is performed in a ghetto and, finally, in the 1950s we see a young Yale playwright telling the elderly Asch that he plans to bring the play on new audiences. “In Connecticut?” says Asch laconically. “Good luck with that.”
Indecent tells this true story in 105 minutes with a cast of ten performers who are sitting as still as statues along the back wall as the audience arrives.
Rachel Taichman’s direction (she has worked with the playwright since the very beginnings of this play) brings a great deal of lyrical beauty to an account of people whose culture and language is under threat. Even in the relative safety of America anti-semitism is rife between the wars although, as a back projection points out, by 1952 many plays and musicals by Jewish writers were taking the country by storm – but they weren’t in Yiddish.
The ensemble production of Indecent is characterised by multi-roling, freeze frames, slow motion, choreographed dance sequences, some singing, messages projected on the back wall and a great deal of eloquent stillness and silence. A three piece Klezmer Band is integrated into the action so that we get some evocative minor key melodies along with plangent sound effects.
Finbar Lynch is outstanding as Lemml who first hears the play read in a private house as a young man, is bowled over by it and goes to America with Asch (Joseph Timms and, later Peter Polycarpou – both good) as his stage manager. He brings poignant warmth, wisdom and sadness to the role.
Molly Osborne and Alexandra Silber play the famous “rain scene” several times in different contexts – finally in real rain and it’s breathtakingly powerful as their love is expressed in movement and dance.
And the reason all this works so well is that, of course, it couldn’t be more topical. Anti-semitism hasn’t gone away. The right to free speech is both the USA and the UK is chipped away every day particularly in the light of BLM and Extinction Rebellion. People still march out of theatres if they think a scene will corrupt their children. I suspect we shall hear a lot more of this play.