Two Jews Walk Into a Theatre…

So… there are two men sitting in a theatre foyer, waiting for a show.  They don’t know each other.. but a conversation begins.  Because they’re two old Jews, the conversation begins with argumentative kvetching.  Look at this foyer.  It’s too small.  They turn a Town Hall into a theatre – and the theatre is – what? -  big enough for maybe four hundred people?  Can four hundred people fit in this foyer?  No.  It’s too small…

The two old Jews are played by Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzanek, seated on the apron of the Arts House proscenium arch theatre, each of them acting (?), impersonating (?), channelling (?) his father.  Mr Lipson, a superb actor, creates a real character in voice, gesture and body language.  Mr Obarzanek, primarily a choreographer, plays it dead straight with a sort of solemn, tight stillness that works perfectly well in this context.  Such is the ubiquity of ‘Jewish humour’ that even the goyim recognise the jokes, the rhythms, the fatalistic negativity, the nit-picking and the irresistibility of argument for argument’s sake.  I suspect than many in the audience recognised their own fathers, possibly with shock and pain – and being Jewish, guilt.

Their ‘conversation’, under the direction of Lucy Guerin, is essentially an improvisation that has been honed and practiced over years.  According to Mr Obarzanek, the show is really about him and Mr Lipson: playing their fathers is a way of getting outside themselves and gaining a new perspective.

So the conversation and the kvetching proceed.  Each father reveals that he is actually there to see his son in the show – i.e. a show with Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzanek.  One father is trepidatious, the other doesn’t really get it, but he’s proud.  And so they go on, sometimes talking past each other, Obarzanek Senior expounding dogmatically, Lipson Senior checking his watch as if not all that interested.

But as the differences between the two opinionated fathers on stage become sharper, the conversation becomes darker and more and more heated.  As elderly Jews, each has a fraught and complex history.  Lipson Senior (original name ‘Lipshitz’) is a London Jew, who served in the British Army; he’s a sceptical leftist with an ironic sense of humour.  Obarzanek Senior is an Eastern European who fled the Nazis; he’s spent time in Israel, he’s proud, ‘conservative’ – and just a little humourless.  Their exchanges move into the most contentious subjects: ‘discipline’, refugees, the Holocaust, Israel... until their conflict becomes shocking (for them and the audience) and locks them into furious silence, a chasm between them. 

And then the show takes a sudden and unexpected turn that throws all that’s gone before into a whole new light.  And then it does it again, switching into a whole new mode, with Bosco Shaw’s beautiful lighting design, to express what unites these two old Jews rather than what has divided them.  If this show is a character study that makes a statement, the performers give it the weight that makes it both moving and entertaining.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Bryony Jackson