Rose
Park Theatre | ★★★★★

There are a fair few monologues out there, each offering very different evenings.

Some were born out of the pandemic like Amy Trigg’s life-enhancing one-woman-show Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me, others would have been better off not being born at all such as the likeable Gary Barlow’s fatally stilted (except when he sings) autobiographical show.

Meanwhile Gabriel Byrne has got into the act with his own take on the journey from working-class Dublin to Hollywood stardom and there is the utterly mesmerising Dutch actor Hans Kesting who is at the Young Vic fronting Ivo van Hove’s explosive adaptation of Édouard Louis’s book about a son’s reunion with an estranged and dying father.

Most of these shows, though not all, have forced me to reassess a somewhat guiltily held prejudice against monologues, a form of theatre which in my experience is well represented when it comes to inert, verbose evenings that feel twice as long as they actually are.

But now here comes Maureen Lipman as proof of how wrong prejudice is in Martin Sherman’s 1999 monologue in which she plays the title role of Rose, an 80-year-old, Ukrainian-born, Miami hotel-owning, three-times-widowed Holocaust survivor.

Scott Le Crass’s production, in which Lipman’s Rose spends the entire play sitting on a bench simultaneously sitting shivah and guiding us through her epic life was reviewed and written about in these pages when the show was first seen in 2020. This was online, before audiences were allowed back in playhouses.

But even those who saw laptop version will get a lot out of being in the company of a fine actor at the top of her game, and a gripping life story which, although fictional, is rooted in all too real 20th century atrocity.

The act of memorising Sherman’s demanding text (the show is two and half hours) is itself no small feat. But to perform it as Lipman does as if every memory in Rose’s head is being expressed for the first time is miraculous.