Mandolin, accordion, trumpet. Washes of mauve, yellow and rose light. Sounds of klezmer, sounds of Tchaikovsky. A young couple – pale-faced, smoky-eyed, loose-limbed. Delicate and captivating, Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson tumble over each other like infant acrobats. She appears with a huge scarlet cockerel on her head; he wears a small green cow.
The pierrot-like figures of Marc Chagall and his wife Bella are brought to tender life in Emma Rice’s revival of Kneehigh’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. First seen more than 20 years ago, Daniel Jamieson’s play conjures up Chagall’s paintings, described by a contemporary critic as “Hebrew jazz”. It is playful and sombre. Folksy but subtle. Figurative and fantastic. Ian Ross’s marvellous music echoes this.
In telling the story of Chagall’s love for Bella Rosenfeld, whom he pictured flying with him above wooden shtetl roofs, the show captures a breathless soaring. It also recovers the almost forgotten voice of Bella, dead from a viral infection in her 50s. Her work as a writer was in her lifetime overshadowed by her husband’s. Jamieson draws on her vivid reimaginings. And focused in this apparently whimsical pair is half the story of the 20th century. World war, the Russian revolution, pogrom.
It is no accident that this story should take to the stage. Inspired by Léon Bakst of the Ballets Russes, Chagall became an exuberant designer for the theatre. Here, he complains that he wishes people would stop prancing around on the stage, as it distracts from his scenery. Not for the first time, I began to wonder why so few artists nowadays turn their hands to the theatre. After all, Vuillard worked with Ibsen. Why have the arts drifted apart?
The show has been flying around the country. Kneehigh can be relied on to make all its venues seem particularly apt, but the Sam Wanamaker seemed truly intended for Chagall. With its wood and its candles, it felt as if it might be a synagogue.
• The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall, 14-31 July
