A stonecutter, a water carrier and a bankrupt grocer set off from their shtetl for the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” on a mission to save stonecutter Efraim’s son from execution for a political murder. The catastrophic history of eastern European Jewry weighs heavily on their shoulders as the three grudging companions jolt towards the capital, Vilnius, aboard a rickety cart pulled by a badly shod mare. “Are you never going to die?” Efraim is asked at the start of their journey. “I paid 100 years in advance,” he drily replies, reminding us that the Jewish joke is a currency that pays out in many territories.
This Russian adaptation of two works by the Lithuanian novelist Grigory Kanovich is a curiosity – a period piece that carries a modern conscience; a hefty throwback to the theatre of the 20th century, which has become part of a 21st-century heritage industry. Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia has produced a three-plus hour “Waiting for Jehovah” with an ensemble of 22, only eight of whom – all men – have speaking parts. For much of the time it’s three old blokes raging against life, against God, against the impossibility of finding the promised land.
Rimas Tuminas’s stately production is constructed around a junk installation that becomes both horse and cart and the stage on and around which the players strut their stuff. There is wit in the way that a sideboard is extricated every time the mare needs a rest, and also in how the performers relate to the assemblage, whether as passengers, onlookers or attacking wolves. Viktor Sukhorukov and Viktor Dobronravov stand out as, respectively, the comic-pathetic mendicant grocer who always wanted to be a tree and a shape-shifting tailor who injects a welcome caper of camp, but for all its comic brio and melancholy grace, the show raises the question: why this, now?
- At the Barbican, London, until 3 March. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
