Cheekily upstaging the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose own version of Anski’s classic opens in two weeks’ time, Julia Pascal has transformed Hasidic myth into an urgent play for today -- a timeless drama that reaches back into the rituals of the past and looks forward into the ashes of the 20th century. Framed by the musings of a young Jewish girl on the sterility of present-day Germany ("I go to Germany and I think that Hitler won") the play is set in 1942 in a Jewish ghetto where the inhabitants confront their terror by ritually acting out the story -- deeply rooted in their culture -- of the bride who is possessed on her wedding day by the restless soul of the young student who loved and lost her. Pascal’s simple, cleverly designed and movingly acted production throws naturalism and expressionism, dance, music and dialogue (in English and Yiddish) into the melting pot and comes up with something distinctly and refreshingly un-British. Purists will no doubt argue that Anski’s original has been subsumed, but this is genuinely creative work which boasts a final sequence that is as spine-tingling as anything you’ll see in the theatre this year.

Lyn Gardner
The Independent
July 9, 1992

At the New End, Hampstead, The Dybbuk is not Solomon Anski’s Yiddish classic but a play by Julia Pascal that both includes it and grows from it, like a musical variation on a theme. A dybbuk is the soul of someone who died too early and comes to inhabit the body of a survivor. And the Jews in the Lithuanian ghetto, who put on the play for themselves, as they wait for the cattle wagons to take them away, already have too many dybbuks of their own. Soon their turn will come and they will become dybbuks themselves.

It may sound a self-conscious way of rewriting a play: but in performance, which is what matters, it has a raw and unforced reality that is grief-stricken as well as proud. To be possessed by those you have lost, Pascal is saying, is a demonic experience in the Greek sense; terrible but also joyful. The ending tries the impossible: to choreograph the Holocaust to the sounds of Mozart’s Lachrymose. But, by then in any case, Pascal has made her point -- that to survive is to be haunted. One of the cast is German, as if to prove that myth, like history, makes no exceptions.

Even today there is no clarification to the many questions posed in the expressionistic approach by director Julia Pascal in her version of the Jewish classic The Dybbuk. 

Her characters, five irreligious Jews complete with a Yellow Star, are confined to an underground ghetto during the period of the Holocaust.  All of them have a Jewish identity crisis. Naomi (Bettina von Knebel) claims her mother was Aryan and expresses strong feelings of hatred at being labeled Jewish.

Jan (Stefan Karsberg) stresses his parents had forgotten their Jewish background and he had been brought up as a Protestant reciting the Lord’s Prayer daily.  But the catalyst which reveals further issues and developments is the enactment by the group of the Dybbuk, with its cabalistic theme of thwarted love and souls united both in life and death.  Doubts about the existence of God and why has he forsaken them are voiced, as well as whether God or Satan created Hitler.