Cast includes Jessica Claire and Paul Herzberg.

Directed by Orly Rabinyan.

Designed by Claire Lyth.

Lighting Design by Jessica Faulks.

Sound Design by Dan Hunt.

Press Officer Anne Mayer.

www.newdiorama.com

A staged reading of Pascal’s play THE RETURN is at The Jewish Museum November 13.   This has been funded by the European Association for Jewish Culture.

A Pascal Theatre Company project

in association with The Drill Hall

staying OUT late

An invitation to older LGBT people living in Camden to participate in free workshops

Philip Osment and Clare Summerskill will be running free workshops in January and February. These will provide an opportunity for you to contribute your thoughts/experiences, hopes and fears about care and ageing, to have a say in the debate and help to change attitudes.

Material from the workshops will be used to develop scenes and songs for a piece of theatre.

The dates are:

22 & 29 January 2011

5, 12, 19 & 26 February 2011

All Saturdays 1pm–4pm

To book a free place, contact Ags Irwin on

07860 248376 or member@agsirwin.freeserve.co.uk

Funded by the Emanuel Vincent Harris Trust and The Lottery.

16 Chenies Street

London WC1E  7EX

drillhall.co.uk

PERFORMANCES are March 31 at 2.30pm and 7.30pm.

Booking from The Drill Hall Box Office. www.drillhall.co.uk

“The Dybbuk,” the 1914 play written by S. Ansky that is a pre-eminent work of Yiddish theater, dramatizes the Ashkenazi Jewish myth of a dislocated soul that inhabits a living person. Ansky’s play itself has something of a shape-shifting spirit, revised many times for the stage, film, dance and even opera. In revisiting the story, the English playwright and director Julia Pascal, who has often mined Jewish themes for their universality, has framed it in the context of the Holocaust, powerfully elevating a folk tale to an existential meditation.

First performed in London in 1992, Ms. Pascal’s “Dybbuk” toured widely in Europe but hasn’t been performed in the United States until now, as part of a new four-week Dream Up Festival at the Theater for the New City.

In this exceptional rendering a dybbuk’s essence is simplified. It is the soul of a person who has died too early, and the play opens with a monologue by Judith (Juliet Dante), a contemporary British Jew describing a trip to Germany. Unable to shake her thoughts of the generations lost to the Nazis, Judith is haunted by the faces she sees in dreams — her own dybbuks.

The scene changes to a wartime ghetto, and Judith becomes one of five Jews living in too-close quarters on little more than fear and memories. When not imagining banquets to feast on, the five — none terribly religious — obsess over what has befallen them. But as the play notes, it doesn’t matter how you define yourself when others are hijacking your identity for their own purposes. Eventually the group unifies culturally, chanting Kaddish, the mourning prayer, and acting out parts of Ansky’s tale, including a vivid dance of possession.

This production, directed by Ms. Pascal and designed by Thomas Kampe, makes ingenious use of simple props like blankets and ladders to convey the debased poverty of the ghetto, the customs of Ansky’s shtetl life, even the grinding forces that confront these souls. The cast members all handle multiple roles unflappably yet with urgency, giving numerous characters colorings of their own.

“Dybbuk” builds to a remarkable climax, with layers of sounds — the barking of orders, the chugging of trains — punctuating a trip to the death camps. To the swelling strains of Mozart’s Requiem, the ensemble depicts dozens of passengers, gaunt and ravaged, disembarking to meet their doom. Well after the play ends, this harrowing image holds fast.

The performances take place at 7pm weekdays and 2pm Saturdays.

Written and Directed by Julia Pascal,
Design and Movement Direction: Thomas Kampe.

Cast:
Juliet Dante
Stefan Karsberg
Adi Lerer
Simeon Perlin
Anna Savva