A Golem Story

Photo: Pia Johnson

A Golem Story is an inspiring spectacle. But, unfortunately, beyond the spectacle of it, there is little in the plot, moral or arrangement of this production that meets the exhilarating atmosphere created by the design.

It is 1580 and a massacre is looming for the Jews of Prague. They have been accused of murdering Christian children. The head of the city guard (Greg Stone) is pushing the Emperor (Mark Jones) to purge of the ghetto. To defend his people, the Chief Rabbi of the city (Brian Lipson), a renowned Kabbalist, will bring forth a creature of terrifying supernatural power: a golem.

Meanwhile, a young woman (Yael Stone) wakes up in a synagogue, her memory and sense of identity in shreds. Is she an omen of destruction? Saviour of her people? Or something else entirely?
Oh, there is such profound material here for theatre!

It is a scenario potent with mystery and symbolism. And there is so much in this production, in the presentation of it, that kens to this potential, like the solemn grandeur of the set (Anna Cordingley), the synagogal choral arrangements (Mark Jones) and Paul Jackson’s end-of-days lighting. There is wood and iron, mud and flame, a thousand splinters of apocalypse-light and the deep shadows of eternity creeping at the wings.

There is all that, but not, alas, a strong narrative or conceptual vision to animate it.

The story described by playwright Lally Katz combines and embellishes various eighteenth and nineteenth-century folktales. In it we get tantalising asides that hint at what might have been: sacrifice and desire, the consecration of theatrical space, the transformative power of the godly Word …

But all this marginal. Instead, the play is dominated by a young-adult story of sensual awakening and a laborious set-up for an involved twist, one that would make M. Night Shyamalan blush.

Director Michael Kantor makes excellent use of the thrust stage and executes a number of very slick scenes, including the intriguingly ambiguous final seconds of the play. In such moments of ambiguity, this production is at its most convincing. But with so much stage-time devoted to arranging the details of the twist, a process that Kantor appears less imaginatively committed to, the energy gathered at the story’s indefinite corners is dissipated.

The performers are thus left hanging between an utterly convincing design scheme and an unimpressive dramatic argument. Brian Lipson as the Rabbi manages best to pitch his performance, and the brief scenes with Mark Jones are also charming.

For both director and writer, this feels like a somewhat effortful essay at “serious” theatre, an attempt to expel the capricious or whimsically weird elements that have characterised both of their respective careers. But neither seems to have found a voice that precisely corresponds to the spiritual mise en scene of the golem story.