All Is Good... In the Glow of the Moonlight

We climb the very steep stairs up to the Explosives Factory playing space.  A big man in a bowler hat and snakeskin shoes greets us – in Spanish.  (A mystery never solved.)  He’s jolly but so big he’s a little intimidating.  He directs us to a table where we can have some soup and black bread.  If he likes the look of you, you may get a tiny nip of vodka...  La Traviata blasts out, filling the space.  Meanwhile, on a platform above the memorabilia littered stage, sit two men, motionless, facing away from each other.  When the lights go down – and then up on them – they face each other and give each other a shave with cutthroat razors...  The image is, if you like, an objective correlative for the relationship of these two men... as we shall see.

All Is Good... In the Glow of the Moonlight is a curious, exciting, highly original piece, devised by people who love theatre, music and philosophical speculation.  It’s a biographical play about Isaac Babel (Joseph Sherman) a Jewish-Russian writer, who lived in the Black Sea port of Odessa, mainly in the Moldavanka Jewish district.  Despite his own bourgeois upbringing, Babel was fascinated by the Odessa demimonde – and in his Odessa Stories (1921-24) he based possibly the most famous and popular of his fictional characters – Benia Krik, a Jewish gangster.  The real gangster, so we’re told, is the big man who played host on our arrival; he now sits to one side with an amiable smile as the play proceeds.  So, who is the other man?  He is the fictional Benia Krik (Simon Starr), and he has a bone or two to pick with his creator.  He doesn’t like the way Bable wrote about him.  It’s not accurate, it’s not fair.  And so, this dispute about the responsibility of an author to his creation is a way into the ironies of Babel’s amazing and ultimately tragic life.

Like Vasily Grossman – also Jewish – who, in WWII, sees the horrors of the front and uses it in his fiction, Babel is assigned to a Cossack regiment in the Civil War and writes about it unsparingly.  A Jew with Cossacks!  But like Grossman, a certain disillusionment sets in.  By the 1930s Babel is out of favour and in 1941, he’s executed by the NKVD secret police.  His last cry is, ‘Let me finish my work!’

The performances by Sherman and Starr are outstanding.  Neither one is a professional actor.  Sherman’s Babel is quicksilver, funny, bursting with energy – and defensive explanations – in Russian, Yiddish, English and Hebrew – shrugging, pleading with distinctive Jewish irony and humour.  He zips about the stage until, worn out, he just has to sit down on a gilded chair.  Meanwhile, Starr’s ‘Benia Krik’ slouches about while taxing Babel for his literary mistakes.  But as Babel’s story goes on, Starr, best known as a musician, movingly provides the music track to Babel’s life – on guitar, trumpet and then most movingly on double bass – and with the last singing a most haunting melancholy song. 

All is Good... In the Glow of the Moonlight (another irony from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov) is superbly theatrical.  It takes many, many risks, but all of them pay off.  The ways and means of the storytelling – David Pledger is the dramaturg – sweep us into the tale and are deliciously imaginative - crisp, economical, blackly humorous and finally deeply sad.  Simon Starr’s music is an essential, emotional component.  We are left with the figure of Isaac Babel - his resilience, vitality, wit and concern for the truth – all snuffed out for being too truthful.

Michael Brindley