The Yiddish writer who risked it
We see Asch’s passionate wish to represent Jews as flawed and complex beings
ITH APOLOGIES to Bill Connor, as the Menier was saying before it was so rudely interrupted, Paula Vogal’s tribute to and about The God of Vengeance — the first play to be written (in 1907) by the great Yiddish writer Sholem Asch — is getting its UK debut. This klezmer-infused work was into previews two springs ago before the pandemic postponed things for a year and a half. It is worth the wait.
I hesitate to say that the evening of 105 uninterrupted mercurial minutes is two plays for the price of one, though not because the phrase is glib.
There are indeed two narratives being told here which, thanks to the alchemy conjured by Pulitzer winner Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman, not only conveys Asch’s plot — about a shtetl brothel keeper whose daughter falls for one of her father’s prostitutes, and which climaxes with him angrily throwing down the Torah he commissioned from his ill-gotten gains — but also the story of how Asch’s work was suppressed by a New York establishment that was both antisemitic and scandalised by a love scene featuring two women.
But Indecent is more than that. It’s a play that breaths life into a world lost to pogroms and then genocide; remembers that America was not always a sanctuary to the tired and poor, and celebrates a seminal portrayal on stage of gay love by a writer who dared to represent female sexuality in a way that women recognised and not as reactionary men wanted, ie not at all.
I wish there was more exploration of this incalculable leap of Asch’s imagination. We see his passionate wish to represent Jews as “flawed and complex” human beings to the outside (gentile) world. But to do it with such daring sensuality? How does a mind break free of the conventions that surround it? I want to know. But perhaps that’s asking too much.
All this is framed by the progress of a Yiddish theatre group and its musicians (Anna Lowenstein’s violin, Merlin Shepherd’s clarinet and Josh Middleton’s accordion) through the theatres of Europe before reaching Greenwich Village and Broadway.
The show’s timeline is driven with text projected onto the bare brick wall of the Menier’s stage announcing “a blink in time” here, a location there, each caption translated into Hebraic Yiddish.
Central is Finbar Lynch’s tailor
Lemml who, contrary to Asch’s learned, sniffy and sniping peers recognises the play’s worth and so becomes its production manager on tour. The scene in which he explains to the troupe’s new American, English-speaking actress how the love affair feels to the women experiencing it is the most tender depiction of direction I can remember. (Although my favourite real-world example remains the time I saw an actor in rehearsals told to “act better.”) To the above list of themes explored by Indecent you can add theatre itself. Lynch is a marvel as Lemml, beautifully underplaying the man’s humility, humanity and when Jospeh Timms’s Asch refuses to support the production when the play was subjected to an obscenity trial, Lemml’s anger too.
It is a performance that embodies much of what was good about the world consumed by the Holocaust. The rest of the excellent cast multi-task with different roles but also outstanding is Peter Polycarpou as the grand Yiddish actor who embraces the play, Beverley Klein as the formidable backbone in the Yiddish troupe and Alexandra Silber and Molly Osborne who as the lovers recreate the charge, tenderness and danger of “legit” theatre’s first lesbian love affair. Unmissable.