An embracing couple fly through the air with the town spread out below them; a fiddler plays on the rooftops; an old Jewish couple stare from a picture frame. Such are the images of the painter Marc Chagall, born into the Russian Jewish settlement of Vitebsk in 1887 and who, long after he had settled in the US, was drawing on his dreams and memories to create his haunting, beautiful paintings that see the world through the eyes of a sleepy, wonderstruck child.
The world he painted was the world of his childhood and youth, a world that was to be swept away first by revolution, and subsequently by the German invasion that wiped out the Shtetl.
Trestle's show, the last to be directed by Toby Wilsher after 23 very good years with this unique company, is a celebration of Chagall's life and work. It is a visually ingenious and delightful little show that brings many of the paintings to life on stage via a cast who, with the exception of Edmund Harcourt's Marc Chagall, never speak, but who conjure the artist's life and loves with masks, puppets and live klezmer music. But while it is always charming, it is never really compelling.
In part, this is because the company seem too hung up on recreating the next Chagall image and, in part, because the biographical nature of the show often makes it feel like a superior illustrated lecture. The piece never delves sufficiently into the unconscious, and as a result it never really takes flight or succeeds in taking one kind of art and transforming it into a different form and medium.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
