![]() ![]() They boast writing, clowning, improvising and composing experience on their CVs and it shows. One of the secrets of MuJu’s success is that they bring so many talents to create comedy – and musical comedy at that. Indeed I remember reporting on the group’s early days myself. It’s good too, that this took place at the Tricycle Theatre and that the MuJu Crew is celebrating 10 years since it started life as a youth theatre group to bring together young Jews and Muslims through theatre. ![]() On a day when the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported has risen again – and has, as usual, risen to the top of the news – it’s heartening to report on an evening that made an auditorium full of people of different backgrounds and ages laugh a lot together, as a bunch of talented Muslims and Jews mercilessly sent up both with great and good humour. Tagged: 5 Kilo Sugar, Ariella Eshed, Edinburgh Fringe, Etcetera Theatre, Gur Koren, Israeli Theatre, Jewish Theatre, judi herman, Tik-Sho-Ret Hear Ariella Eshed and cast members talking to Judi post-performance at London's Etcetera Theatre:ĥ Kilo Sugar runs Friday 7 – Saturday 15 August. Unsurprisingly the Israeli version has been running since 2009. Perhaps this is the production that will achieve all that in its forthcoming run in Edinburgh, after the debacle of last year’s beleaguered shows from Israel. Eshed’s Tik-Sho-Ret Theatre (the name means communication in Hebrew) aims to give a platform to Israeli and Jewish theatre in the UK and encourage collaborations through cultural and artistic exchange and to promote communication and co-existence. When I saw the show, it was taken to the collective heart of its hugely enthusiastic and eclectic audience, who guffawed and cheered appreciatively in this tiny (hot and sweaty) fringe theatre. This tale has a real feel of the magic realism of Isaac Singer. Spencer Cowan’s Yoad Riva is both funny and appealing, trying to trade sexual favours for that mention in the book, and Shia Forester and Micah Banai have the intriguing job of playing everything from 'bored prostitute' to 'well-read taxi driver' and 'Dostoyevsky aficionado', most of them morphing into bodies possessed by grandfather so he can engage with grandson Gur (so playing a personality within a personality – most of them expansive). Tom Slatter’s Gur Koren is indeed engaging and sympathetic and gets a lot of fun out of the surreal situation of talking to people who are being ‘occupied’ by grandfather’s ghost – and explaining to them that when he addresses what is apparently the air (shades of Hamlet again) he is actually doing a monologue to camera. The cast of four work wonderfully together and tackle the different roles that most of them get to play with relish. ![]() This is a lovely intimate piece of writing, with a hero who engages one-to-one with his audience (it’s a mockumentary, so we're cast as a TV or film audience) that gets the production it deserves by director Ariella Eshed. This is the clever, quirky premise of Gur Koren’s moving, funny chamber piece, which opens a window onto the past, to remind us that it is always with us, particularly in the case of second and third generation Holocaust survivors, and especially for Israelis. But Grandfather is rankled in death, as in life, and now he’s spotted a chance to set the record straight, for the cowardly landsman's historian of a grandson, Yoad Riva, is writing a book about his grandfather. All Grandfather’s co-survivor and landsman (person from the same village) has done is slope off when the pair are apprehended for trying to sell smuggled sugar on the black market, leaving Grandfather to face the music and two months in a Russian labour camp. It’s not quite on the same scale of the vengeance that, say, Hamlet’s father demands. So your late grandfather assumes the role of a fairly benign dybbuk (malevolent spirit) and enters the bodies of a variety of unsuspecting hosts, mostly Israeli (as we are mostly in Tel Aviv), to gee you up to right what he perceives as a historical wrong perpetrated during the 1940s in post-war Eastern Europe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |