Break a leg – or get shot: the Jewish actors who braved Stalin's terror
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Version 0 of 1. I first came across Solomon Mikhoels and the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre in the 1980s, as I researched a PhD in Yiddish. (I say "researched" as I didn't quite finish it and that way it sounds as if I might have done.) Yiddish, the language of east European Jewry, was spoken by 11 million people before the second world war. Though the Holocaust and assimilation threatened it with extinction, its future is now safe in the hands of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. You'll often find me subtly eavesdropping on orthodox Jews in Clissold Park in London, trying to glean what words like the Yiddish for email might be (blitspost, in case you were wondering). As a lover of Yiddish, I found myself constantly fighting stereotypes such as the charge that Yiddish is just a bastardised German. It isn't. Or if it is, then so is English which, like Yiddish, is a fusion language or (to use a Yiddish term) a mish-mash of Germanic and Norman. I'd find myself kvetching (another Yiddish word) against those nebbishes (ditto) who have the chutzpah (ditto again) to say Yiddish is little more than a repository of admittedly brilliant curses, like my favourite: "May all your teeth fall out except for one, and from that may you have eternal toothache!" Then there's Yiddish theatre, which for so many Jews is associated with schmaltz (I'll stop pointing out the Yiddish words now, though I may well schlep out a few more). That's why it was such a joy to discover Goset, to use the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre's Russian acronym, and its artistic director Solomon Mikhoels. Here was a company that in its heyday in the 1920s and 30s was feted throughout the world. Chagall designed for it; Eugene O'Neill and Max Reinhardt raved about it. Shostakovich reckoned Mikhoels was Russia's greatest Lear. In the cultural fervour immediately after the 1917 revolution, state subsidies that would reduce the Arts Council to tears allowed the company to rehearse productions of 50 actors and 40 musicians for up to two years. The purges that began in the mid-30s ended this honeymoon period and forced Goset to work in conditions that to us in the West would feel insurmountable. If the play I've now written about the company, Making Stalin Laugh, gets a bad review then that will be disappointing and may affect sales and my dream of an Olivier award. But a bad review for Goset could literally be a death sentence. The celebrated Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak, for example, was arrested when the authorities turned against his play Boytre the Bandit, and after a brief show trial he was executed in 1937. Even a long-running hit could suddenly be denounced as "counter-revolutionary", striking panic into all concerned. Party apparatchiks and "true workers" with no previous interest in theatre would be brought in to pronounce on what the repertoire should be, or sit in on rehearsals and give notes that were not to be ignored. Actors would suddenly disappear, never to be seen again. And yet somehow, even as the Stalinist terror reached its height, Goset thrived creatively, mounting bold, expressionist productions, experimenting with humour and sound, music and movement. In the end, the terror caught up with them. Mikhoels, despite being one of the most celebrated actors in the Soviet Union, was murdered on Stalin's orders in 1948, the killing disguised as a traffic accident. Then, on 12 August 1952, all the surviving luminaries of Yiddish culture were executed. It's as if all our favourite national treasures – Judi Dench, Mike Leigh, Jeremy Paxman, whoever – were exterminated in one swoop. That was the end of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. But what exhilarated me when researching my play was that, despite the terribly difficult situation they found themselves in – war, censorship, the purges – the company behaved like every other acting company I've been involved in: moaning about other actors stealing their laughs, having affairs and tantrums, playing pranks, having a laugh. Mikhoels himself seemed to be a charismatic genius like so many leading actors I've worked with – brilliant but flawed, incredibly generous one moment and self-obsessed the next, like a sort of Walter White from Breaking Bad who chose to make theatre instead of crystal meth. Goset's story was a triumphant one of resilient humanity, resilient all the way down to the right to be petty about who has the most lines, or the right to make jokes in the darkest of situations (Jews are, after all, the people who put the "oy" into "joy"). They were ordinary people (well, ordinary actors) coping in an extraordinary situation, one where, in a way, everyone had to act to survive, and it's exciting to be able to celebrate their shtick. Which is, of course, a Yiddish word. Making Stalin Laugh is at JW3, London NW3, from 15 June to 9 July. |