A collection of stories by Yiddish literature's most expert and beloved fabulist, Sholom Aleichem, ought, you would suppose, make perfect material for theatrical adaptation. Aleichem, after all, created the character of Tevye the Milkman, and the musical for which Tevye became the central figure, Fiddler on the Roof, became a record-setter on Broadway.
And so, to some extent, it proves. Aleichem's stories, 11 of which are included in Saul Reichlin's one-man show, deal in the grubby, poverty-stricken small change of the Russian shtetls, at the last gasp of pre-Revolution isolation and victimisation. (Aleichem himself emigrated to the US in 1905, and died in New York in 1916.) Historical events intrude occasionally - the Dreyfus affair gets a couple of mentions - but as one of Reichlin's early selections, Dreyfus in Kasrilevkeh, makes clear, newsworthy events are remote and distant, in a wrong-end-of-the-telescope kind of way.
No, Aleichem's world is the eternal shtetl that has been mythologised almost out of history: this is an environment that to all intents and purposes, saw no changes between 1690 and 1890. Aleichem's small-scale, homely narratives - in which a Jewish traveller picks up a tsarist officer's cap by mistake, or a harmless schnorrer (beggar), ironically nicknamed Rothschild, trips over a drunk shoemaker on a feast day - point up this sense of self-containment and self-sufficiency. That's why they make such good nostalgia too; Tevye and his ilk are sentimentalised icons of hopefulness, betterment, and vessels of good fortune - exactly the kind of qualities that have traditionally preoccupied successive Jewish generations, both before and since Aleichem's time.
Reichlin has obvious affection for his material, and exercises considerable skill in giving voice to the multiplicity of characters that the inter-connected stories require. On the other hand, the tales cry out for a strongly visual staging - both in terms of performance and in stage hardware. Director Robert Longden, however, has chosen to go for basic, unchanging lighting; a painted stage, and a single samovar in the corner. Reichlin, despite his ability to spin a yarn, tends to the static, relying on his ability to connect with the audience and verbal dexterity to keep momentum going. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work: by second half, there's not much to distinguish it from a radio play.
Until September 3. Box office: 020-7794 0022.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible
