Look at this line. ‘I’m 80 years old. I find that unforgivable.’ Could an actor get a laugh on ‘unforgivable’? Maureen Lipman does just that in Rose, by Martin Sherman, a monologue spoken by a Ukrainian Jew who lived through the horrors of the 20th century. In the opening sections, Lipman plays it like a professional comic and she fills the theatre with warm, loving laughter. Rose’s dad is a hypochondriac who spends all day in bed. ‘He never stopped dying but as far as we could tell there was nothing wrong with him.’ Eventually he loses his life when a wardrobe stuffed with pills topples on to him. ‘He was crushed to death by medicine.’
As a teenager, Rose witnesses a raid by Cossack horsemen but their savagery is relatively benign. ‘They didn’t try to harm us. They just smashed everything up.’
One hesitates to call a work a ‘masterpiece’ but this production aims for and fulfils that ambition
She gets through by accident.
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