The opening scene of Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear, with it’s verbal motifs of "positions", "time" and "terminus", casts the oblique shadow of the Holocaust, but then veers away; only in the final scenes do we return to the upheavals which, like the Anglo-French war in Shakespeare’s original, unmake the old, known world and destroy the central characters.

Pascal’s intelligent, witty and affecting rewrite is set for the most part in New York of 1939-40; in the first narrative scene proper, we see actor-manager Esther Laranovska auditioning young theatrical hopefuls by getting them to recite Hamlet in Yiddish.

The plot is familiar, although only at the end of the first act does this "queen" abdicate, leaving the money she has amassed over 40 years in the theatre to her two elder daughters to open a nightclub. Then, thrown out of eldest daughter Gail’s apartment on discovering her affair with sister Rachel’s husband Irving (Goneriel, Regan and Edmund respectively), queen Laranovska joins the already banished remains of her old company (a trio who serve almost interchangeably as Kent, Edgar and the Fool) busking on the street.

When youngest daughter Channele rediscovers her mother, being unable to bring the French powers into the land to right these wrongs as did her antecedent Cordelia, she absconds with her sister’s nest-egg and takes the company to France. Unfortunately, while they are at sea, as one of them puts it, "Herr Shickelgruber decides to visit Paris", and now "the Germans like Jews so much they're collecting them". Which is almost where we come in.

Pascal wrote the part of Esther for Ruth Posner, who is magnificent, commanding through quiet assurance rather than blustery "king-acting", and finding herself ground down but never quite disintegrating until the penultimate, but cruelest, twist: Esther finally goes mad only on hearing of Gail’s death, revealing that it is the elder ingrate rather than the angelic Channele who has always been her favourite.

Amanda Boxer is an almost sympathetic Gail for all her selfishness, and Natasha Pollard as Channele makes the finest smiling yet suffering Cordelia I have seen in a few years. Anna Ziman, Anton Blake and Tim Levine are equally strong as Esther’s loyal company. Pascal directs with her customary sensitivity, doing justice at once to the human story in the foreground, its classical origins (as also in her powerful version of The Dybbuk) and the horrors lurking at the edge, waiting to become a final-act diabolus ex machina.

Ian Shuttleworth
The Financial Times
 

In a run-down New York theatre a group of actors are auditioning to play Hamlet. Nothing unusual about that, except they perform "To be or not to be" entirely in Yiddish.

One of the great pleasures of Julia Pascal’s play is that it celebrates a theatrical tradition of which, I confess, was entirely ignorant. Between the late 19th century and the second world war, Yiddish theatre flourished in New York and Europe, with rival companies regularly crossing the Atlantic. Hitler’s gas chambers put an end to all that.

It is against the growing realities of the war that Pascal sets her play, one that is inspired by Shakespeare’s original but is no mere transposition of gender, place and time. It is 1939 and Esther Laranovska -- known as "the Yiddish Eleanora Duse" -- is old, tired and under pressure from two of her three daughters to retire. Gittele and Rachele, both on the brink of marriage, are thoroughly modern American misses who see the future in slick nightclubs rather than the vulgar tradition of the Yiddish theatre. Finally yielding to their demands, Esther disinherits her youngest daughter Channele cuts herself off from her devoted friends and hands of her business over to her avaricious children.

Destitute and living on the streets of New York, Esther and her former loyal employees are rescued by Channele, who promises her mother she will see Europe one last time. In what must be one of the most ill-considered career moves of the century, the troupe set sail.

Pascal’s Esther may not undergo quite the same spiritual torment and journey into madness as Lear, but the modern playwright has the edge when it comes to the psychology of family relationships and trauma. Aided by finely nuanced performances from the trio of young actors who play the daughters, Pascal builds up an intricate portrait of a family fractured by sibling jealousies and betrayals and seething resentments.

The final scene, as Esther and her party traverse the Alps heading for the promised land of Switzerland and hot chocolate, has more emotional impact in theory than it does in practice, and the production demands a much stronger design aesthetic than it is given. But although Pascal the playwright and Pascal the director don’t always serve each other to their best advantage, this is still a fascinating and enjoyable evening.

Lyn Gardner
The Guardian
April 29, 1999
 

Charm and horror are never far apart in Julia Pascal’s moving reworking of Shakespeare, which mourns the loss of pre-war Yiddish theatres, their music-hall comedy and plaintive schmaltz. Ruth Posner is grand but distracted as a faded actress dividing her fortune between three daughters with lovely singing, sensitive direction and a tragic historical twist, this play is an effecting and eclectic treat.

The Evening Standard