The Threepenny Opera meets Fiddler On The Roof in Gesher Theatre's recreation of the stories of Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who created fantastical tales around the characters he met in the cosmopolitan Black Sea port of Odessa. For a man whose childhood was blighted by pogroms, and who would eventually be executed for treason by Stalin, Babel retained a relentlessly optimistic and comic outlook on life.
Gesher Theatre, first seen in this country two years ago with Joshua Sobol's Village, was founded in Israel in 1991 by recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Perhaps that explains the sense of nostalgia that pervades Odessa Stories.
In fact, nostalgia and whimsy are the dominant moods in an evening that starts out sweet and gets progressively sicklier. In one dramatised story an ever-pregnant chambermaid is offered an angel as a temporary bedfellow, and earns God's displeasure when she accidentally crushes the angel to death during love-making. In another, a Jewish photographer, eager to buy a camera in a town where Jews are forbidden to stay overnight, strikes up a tender and chaste relationship with a downtrodden prostitute. Several segments concern the activities of Odessa's lowlife, a raffish group of gangsters who waste each other in a party-like atmosphere, laughing their heads off as they trundle towards death.
Only the final, autobiographical story, in which the young Babel falls victim to his first pogrom, turns away from comedy. But once again the staging concentrates on making beautiful pictures rather than dealing with hard-edged truth.
The production, performed in strongly Russian-influenced Hebrew with English surtitles, is certainly sumptuous and, like the people it depicts, has a vibrance and energy that is often engaging. But the stories are so slight, and their meanings so elusive that, in the end, it all comes down to spectacle. And even that begins to pall due to a lack of variety. The combination of burps, farts, laughter, choral and classical music and brass band, and the grainy, pretty stage tableaux that are constantly being reformed on the trolleys that run on rails across the stage, is initially entrancing but soon seems over-ripe and overblown. I guess the evening is supposed to engender a sense of wonder but, quite frankly, the only thing I wondered at was the huge cost of this kitsch folly.
