PATRICK MARMION on theatre: Forget Beattie on the phone, ‘Rose’ is Maureen Lipman in full bloom

Rose (Ambassador’s Theatre, London)

Verdict: Dame Maureen Rises

Judgement:

Could it be that Maureen Lipman is best known for BT phone commercials over 30 years ago? The ones where she gloated about a grandson who would study a “ology” at university?

Now 77, she hasn’t been idle since. But few, if any, were as provocative or compelling as Martin Sherman’s two-hour one-man show about an 80-year-old Jewish refugee reflecting on her life in the 20th century, first seen in 1999 at the National Theater starring Olympia . Dukakis.

Lipman now takes on the role of Rose, who grew up in a 1920s shtetl in eastern Ukraine. Her story is a biblical yarn in which she is an Ashkenazi Jewish woman mourning the Holocaust, exile and hoping for a homeland. Her story is told emphatically, looking back from the end of the millennium, as Rose holds shiva (the Jewish custom of keeping a vigil) for all her relatives and ancestors.

We hear of Yossel, the red-haired love of her life with earrings and their child Esther, murdered in the confusion of a Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto soup kitchen.

She evades the death camps by hiding in sewers and meets sweet American klutz Sonny during a botched human smuggling operation to Palestine, and instead they settle in Atlantic City, New Jersey, also known as ‘Warsaw On Sea’.

But her dream of one day finding a home in Israel is poisoned by war and politics in a country where she discovers that speaking Yiddish has become a joke.

And it’s a story peppered with bitter truths that call for reflection on the nature of God: “Like a police officer, he’s never there when you need him.”

Performed sitting on a wooden shiva bench, Scott Le Crass’ production is inevitably static, but the symbolism of that bench is not to be underestimated – nor is the gray smock, reminiscent of a concentration camp uniform.

Framed by a gray mane of Lion King hair, Lipman’s sad eyes and sardonic smile, worn out by a century of suffering, do the heavy lifting. It is a performance of a lifetime, in which the history of an entire nation is distilled. It deserves to overshadow those ads.

Great Expectations (Garrick Theatre)

Verdict: Isn’t to love

Judgement:

Eddie Izzard’s life has had its own ups and downs.

The actor, comedian and marathon runner (who prefers to be known as she and Suzy) was born in Aden and travels the world. She lost her mother when she was six.

Now we see Izzard pull off a mesmerizing solo turn in Charles Dickens’ tale of self-discovery, Great Expectations. It’s a loving, camp, fast-moving summary of the book, told from the ever-changing point of view of the orphaned hero, Pip.

Blasting through a gallery of gothic characters, conjured with a nod, a look and a gurgle, Izzard’s strong point is Pip as a child, making faces behind the teeming characters’ backs.

Adapted by (brother) Mark Izzard, the show revels in Dickens’ language. We hear of fish-faced Pumblechook whose hair “looked like it had been arranged by a dying relative,” and menacing Magwitch, who is so hungry that “if I had brought any appetite to the table, he would have eaten that too.”

Izzard’s theatrical persona is also pure Dickens (despite the striking haircut of a middle-aged woman who doesn’t want to let herself go).

Trotting across the bare stage under flowy velvet curtains, Izzard never sentimentalizes Dickens’ idiom or overloads it with Simon Callow’s Christmas pudding dictum.

But the crafty part is how that carelessness belies the teetering weight of the plot – allowing the two-hour story to sneak up on us and rob us, in much the same way Pip did.

A love tangle of a midsummer night that is half dream, half nightmare

By Georgina Brown

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s Globe)

Verdict: a devilish charm

Judgement:

Shakespeare’s playful error-comedy is many people’s introduction to the bard, so it’s a pleasure to see a revival where the story unravels with easy clarity while echoing the play’s less harmonious notes.

Because this is a play about falling in love, unfair and unfathomable, sometimes a dream, sometimes a nightmare, usually both.

The production of Elle White opens on a stage, bare but with some weird turquoise and gold tentacles curling around the columns and a gray bundle – the changing baby that Oberon and Titania, fairy rulers, squabble over.

The fairies around these enchanted parts are shaggy, their dances a merry haka, and their chief, Puck, a masked goblin, earthy yet unearthly, hair a tangle of twigs, hands of tangled roots, a diabolical delight for disturbance.

Played with quiet fatigue and a deliberate androgyny by Michelle Terry, this punkish Puck is amused by the confusion that ensues when the love potion makes everyone fall in love with the wrong partner.

Elsewhere, a gender flexibility pervades. In a bold touch, the mechanics are a group of females. Mariah Gale plays Bottom, the weaver, as Nicola B’tome, whose hilarious Hyacinth Bouquet-style social ambitions are just as high as her acting ambitions.

This may be the first time a fairy queen (a sneaky Marianne Oldham) finds sapphic ecstasy entangled in her gazebo with Miss B’tome, now magically transformed into a hiccuping and hiccuping donkey.

But the star of this fresh and funny show is Francesca Mills’ high-spirited Hermia, an actress with dwarfism, who gets every inch of comic mileage from the taunts about her size and the insults she hurled at the “painted maypole,” the “tall character That’s her once friend Helena.

The dissonant tone is beautifully underlined by the beautiful brassy jazz band and although this Dream never enchants, it enchants itself.

Grab your bucket and mop, soldier – you’re in the opera now…

By Tully Potter

Wozzeck (Royal Opera)

Verdict: A staging that keeps you at bay

Judgement:

As elusive and fragmented as Wozzeck is, he can be deeply poignant; but this production begins to alienate us before the music even begins: we see the regiment’s latrines, with soldiers prowling the stage to relieve themselves in front and behind.

The opening scene between Wozzeck, armed with a bucket and mop, and the captain takes place in this unsavory location, without the permission of the composer or the original playwright.

Wozzeck is supposed to be a soldier, but director Deborah Warner keeps him in green overalls the entire time, as if he’s more of a prisoner – is she trying to make a mysterious philosophical point?

The arm’s length alienation persists scene after scene as we watch Hyemi Shin’s skeletal sets continually being taken apart and reassembled. God knows, Alban Berg’s expressionist music is hard enough to get into at the best of times, and he’s getting no help here.

It isn’t until Wozzeck’s friend Marie is on stage with their child that the true grip of the couple’s situation becomes apparent, paying homage to Anja Kampe’s fine vocals; but her murder by him becomes an even more informal act than usual.

I remember Geraint Evans’ moving portrayal of Wozzeck, who, with gruff tones, pulled a man from his depths, no match for the forces that fell upon him from within and without.

Christian Gerhaher is a lieder baritone, too refined to convey the earthiness of Wozzeck as portrayed by playwright Georg Buchner.

The most grotesque miscasting is to have the chubby Clay Hilley as the supposedly dashing Drum Major seducing Marie. Should we import an overweight American with a voice like a meat cutter for a role that any of the ten British tenors could fill?

Singers of good character abound: Peter Hoare as the Captain, Brindley Sherratt as the doctor who experiments on Wozzeck (foreshadowing what was to come under Hitler), Rosie Aldridge as Margret, Sam Furness as Andres, John Findon as the fool.

The four stars are mainly for the strong orchestra and choir, who wonderfully perform this difficult music under the red-hot baton of Antonio Pappano.