Not since Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park With George has musical theatre so vividly represented a painter's work on stage - until now. What Sondheim did for pointillist artist George Seurat, director Emma Rice and writer Daniel Jamieson have done for the surreal and in many ways incomparable Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Their show is called The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk.
Set in the shtetl where the Chagalls first lived together, the show was first created in the early 1990s by Rice and Jamieson when they were budding young theatre practitioners. Like their subject they were also lovers. Now Rice, the new artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe and formerly the co-director of Kneehigh theatre company has revived the piece, although this time she is not on stage. The two-hander stars Marc Antolin as Chagall and Audrey Brisson as his wife Bella.
It's been years since Rice visited the lost world of the Jewish shtetl.
"A lot of my work is personal," she explains during a break in rehearsals at Bristol's Old Vic theatre where the production opened earlier this month. Next week it arrives at the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the interior sister stage of the Globe.
"It's quite unusual because I and Dan, who wrote this piece, were actually together at the time. So it was made by two very young people in love about two young people in love."
There was a sheepish, guilty shrug when you asked about Jewish life
Sitting on the desk in front of Rice is a copy of photographer Roman Vishniac's book of Polish Jewish life, A Vanished World. Beyond is the steeply raked and seemingly off-balance stage. The intention, says Rice, is to evoke rather than recreate Chagall's famous portraits of himself and Bella flying over their shtetl, or suspended in mid-air in the kitchen of their house as they kiss.
"I really don't want to make them fly as it's really complicated getting actors into harnesses," says Rice. "But Chagall's work is always off-balance, and so the designer and I have been working on how nothing in Chagall is straight. Nor is anything on this set."
Jamieson adds: "The play covers the moment Marc met Bella to the moment she dies during the Second World War [in New York, of a throat infection].
"It includes the couple being caught up in St Petersburg during the October Revolution. The significance of that for a poor Jew at the time can't be underestimated. Because before then you needed a permit to even be in Russia if you were a Jew who wasn't rich. And all of that was swept away at the time of the revolution.
"There is a kind of surge of optimism and excitement at that moment in the play," continues Jamieson who was partly inspired to write the piece after he and Rice worked with the Polish physical theatre company Gardzienice in the late 1980s. They visited many villages in an area which was Polish but is now part of Belarus.
"Some of the villages we went to had a Catholic or Russian Orthodox identity," remembers Jamieson. "But it felt like a third of each village had been removed, and left a hole. There was a kind of sheepish, guilty shrug when you would ask if there were remnants of Jewish life there."
There's a scene in the play when Bella, a talented writer who wrote in Yiddish, is seen reading a passage form her memoir Burning Lights. She was living in New York at the time and had largely abandoned her writing to support her husband. But she picked up her pen when news of her community's destruction reached her. She wrote of her childhood in Vitebsk.
"Before she starts reading [in the play] she has arranged shoes across the stage and each pair has a book between them," says Jamieson. "It's a beautiful and very subtly mournful section - a metaphor of the whole Jewish population of eastern Europe departing. There's not just a sense of loss for those who died but of migration and of those endless journeys."
The narrative also takes in Chagall's rise and fall within Russia and the country's art scene, says Jamieson.
"The revolution was important not just for Jews in Russia but because artistically. The avant-garde became the new institution overnight. Chagall was thrust right to the top of the artistic establishment and invited to be Commissar of Fine Art. He turned it down on Bella's advice, very wisely. It was as if she knew that those who were swept up and elevated by these huge events could just as easily be crushed by them.
"So Chagall set up an art school in Vitebsk which within two or three years was taken over by terrible in-fighting. And then his work was deemed unacceptable as proletarian art, as socialist art veered off towards social realism."
Neither Rice or Jamieson are Jewish. And their priority was to reflect Chagall's work with integrity, rather than authentically capture shtetl life. Still, they remember with laughter how they went to a visit to what they describe as Jewish archives in north London. It was in 1990 and they can't remember exactly where. But they do remember having to go through endless security checks.
When they were eventually shown to a room they asked for source material showing shtetl life. The archivist handed them a box. Inside was a video of Fiddler on the Roof. "Everything you need to know is in there," they were told.
"I have to say I have watched it al lot," laughs Rice as rehearsals resume. "So you'll probably find that there's some Fiddler in the play too."
The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is Shakespeare's Globe from June 16 - July 2. It then travels to Southampton and Cornwall.
