The lovers Marc Chagall and his wife Bella may not actually fly through the sky in this show, as they do in Chagall's fantastical, impressionist paintings, but the gravity-defying effects here are undeniable. Hearts are uplifted. Spirits soar.
This is Emma Rice's swan-song production as co-artistic director of Kneehigh. She started work on it before she knew she was to be the next artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe. But like a reluctant parent she's keeping it close by installing the production at the Globe's candle-lit indoor playhouse. You can't blame her. It's brimful of irresistible, childlike charm and playfulness.
Sophia Clist's design of criss-crossing wooden beams and a raked, angled stage wouldn't look out of place in the playground of an urban park. Marc Antolin's loose-limbed Chagall and Audrey Brisson's compact Bella swoon and sway as they enter the first flush of love. Gripping knotted ropes that hang from the set's corners they are rarely seen in state of stillness or natural repose, much like their counterparts in Chagall's self-portraits. Everything is off-kilter here.
When I wrote about this show recently I wrongly described the couple's home town of Vitebsk as a shtetl. But as Antolin's Chagall describes it, when he and Bella met it in 1914 it was a city with two cathedrals and over 60 synagogues before the Nazis destroyed "every atom" of Jewish life. Its life is suggested here with a light and often very funny touch. This being a two-hander (plus musicians) there is no one to carry the couple on chairs in the marriage scene, so they do it themselves with fake legs dangling from the seats.
Rice and Etta Murfitt's choreography tangles Cossack and Jewish moves and is danced by Antolin and Brisson as if their bones knew the steps from the moment they were born. And just as memorable is their close harmony singing, performed here with some of the sweetest music by composer Ian Ross – often as folky as it is Yiddish – that you're likely to hear at the theatre.
The triumph of playwright Daniel Jamieson's script is that it reflects Jewish culture without wallowing in religiosity. Yet although Jewish life and sensibility is always present, the heart of the matter here is love, and how it is not always loving. The brilliant Bella's talents were only belatedly recognised by the self-obsessed Marc. He was on a painting binge when she gave birth to their daughter. It was four days before he saw her. When she complains of his absence his response is breathtaking: "You think what I do comes without pain?" But a sweeter couple you could't wish to meet, for the most part even Chagall's heart is in the right place – as is this gem of a show's.
