A fiddler perches on the roof of a doll-sized house, but the music he plays – Nick Cave's The Carny – is grinding and grotesque, and the flight it conjures up is not one of fancy, but of exhausted Jews escaping pogroms, or filing towards a concentration camp. The opening image of Iram, an adaptation of short stories by Sholem Aleichem (the man who gave us Tevye the milkman, star of the musical Fiddler), is grimly unsentimental. But then, this production by Israeli theatre group Herzliya Ensemble, directed by Ofira Henig, is under no illusions that life in an isolated, small-minded, poverty-stricken shtetl was anything but grim.
The inhabitants of Kasrilevke display few redeeming features: we see them mock the undertaker for harbouring ambitions for his son, torment a disabled child dubbed "the creature", and revel in others' misfortunes. Even when Henig invites sympathy – for the daughter of the rabbi who submits to her draconian mother's vaginal examination before being forced to marry, or for the woman with a sickly son, agonising that her cooking pot is no longer kosher – the characters themselves seem to stiffly reject it.
Iram is a difficult piece, because it is sardonic and ambiguous, not least in its attitude to Judaism: these people use their faith as a stick with which to beat their neighbours, and the only character who progresses in the world does so by abandoning his religion. It mostly feels like a solemn argument with the state of Israel: warning partly of the dangers of being, like Kasrilevke, "a world unto itself", and partly of rejecting Yiddish culture, which, in the programme, Henig argues was "erased in order for the new Zionist Israeli culture to be maintained". The past may be ugly, but by eradicating it, we risk repeating its mistakes.
