In a Manchester still mourning its own lost children, there is something unbearably poignant about watching Rose – played by Janet Suzman – sitting shivah for a little girl killed in a terrible act of violence. Who this child is slowly emerges in Martin Sherman’s one-woman play.
Eighty-year-old Rose is a survivor. She has survived the Warsaw ghetto and the loss of her family and several husbands. But can she survive the loss of a culture and a way of life? Who still speaks Yiddish now? Is Rose just the relic her Israeli son, living in a promised land where the milk has turned sour and the honey is less sweet, seems to think she is? Just another European Jew living in Miami Beach, whose Jewishness resides only in a fondness for chopped liver and maybe a belief in dybbuks?
Part of the problem with Sherman’s overlong, over-static play is raised by Rose herself. When she recalls her time in the shtetl of her birth, she wonders whether she might really be remembering a scene from Fiddler on the Roof. Despite the efforts of Suzman, who brings a spry dignity to the role, Rose never emerges as a distinctive character. Instead she comes across as a Jewish everywoman who, in being burdened as a representative of the last century, has her history reduced to one damn thing after another.
• At Home, Manchester, until 10 June. Box office: 0161-200 1500
