I keep thinking of a concreted meadow. Not because of how throughly coronavirus has smothered the performative arts, but because of the green shoots breaking through.
Every day brings more announcements about work that was created to be experienced in the flesh being made accessible online. Opera is being streamed; musicians such as violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen are performing live from their living room and theatres are putting plays on the web with the already slightly hackneyed mantra “the show must go online”.
Of these, one of the most pertinent is from Hampstead Theatre, which is uploading past productions from its digital archive beginning with Mike Bartlett’s 2016 Edward Snowden thriller Wild which will be available until Sunday.
The play imagines Snowden in isolation and holed up in a Moscow hotel room as the paranoid whistleblower attempts to evade vengeful spooks. Whether intended or not, the play will resonate hugely with a new audience viewing from their own isolation at home.
Some work is being created specifically to reflect the state of relative solitude being experienced by artists and their audience. Theatre company Headlong is commissioning no less than 15 intimate new plays from as many dramatists to explore these unprecedented times.
Among the impressive list is Josh Azouz whose excellent The Mikvah Project was running at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre when, like every other playhouse, it was forced to close by the pandemic. The venue has now responded by uploading their co-production of Amsterdam by Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur who lived in the city for a time.
Sparkily performed by four actors who each double as characters and narrators, it is a work that requires some foreknowledge about the events that led to Arad Yasur writing the play.
She was inspired by the discovery that unpaid gas bills awaited Jewish Holocaust survivors when they returned to their city from the camps. They were apparently liable even though the bills were racked up while they were away, possibly by Nazi occupants.
Even with that information, the plot of this mystery is not always clear. Arad Yasur’s heroine is a pregnant Israeli violinist and composer who finds one such unpaid 1944 gas bill on her doorstep. The city’s past and the violinist’s present are fused.
Arad Asur is as interested in how she tells the story as she is in the story itself. The plot’s facts are playfully bartered over by the cast’s four actors (Michal Horowicz, Daniel Abelson, Fiston Barek and Hara Yannas). Occasionally, they rush to a nearby microphone to translate a word from one language into another, a running distraction that feels less than necessary.
This freestyling storytelling technique is stuck with for longer than its apparent objective —illustrating the pliability of history — might justify. It becomes tiresome.
Still, Asur has used Holocaust history to create a thoroughly modern work that explores the complexity of what it is to be an Israeli Jew in Europe. And because Matthew Xia’s Actors Touring Company production was performed in the round, viewers watching on their laptop can effectively sit opposite other audience members who were present when the play was filmed.
Sure, it is less than ideal to experience a play this way. Children interrupt and you quickly learn to turn off news alerts with the virus’s latest death toll.
But the play survives. This one is well worth watching. The concrete is cracking.
