Review: ROSE, Ambassadors Theatre

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

After its run at the Park Theatre last year, this revival of Martin Sherman’s Rose celebrates its transfer to the West End at the Ambassadors Theatre with a staggering, tour-de-force central performance from Maureen Lipman.

This is a gruelling and stark one-woman show focusing on the eponymous Rose (Lipman) – a relentlessly displaced Jewish refugee, now reflecting on the past decades of her life spanning continents, wars, political ideologies and husbands as she sits shivah (far from the first mourning ritual she has observed in her life).

Martin Sherman’s script is broad and sweeping in its scope, taking the audience from Ukrainian pogroms through the holocaust to an attempted settling in Palestine and across the Atlantic to America. As well as a sobering lesson in Jewish persecution, this show explores the blurry intersection between history and memory, with Rose repeatedly questioning whether her memories are of press coverage or her own first-hand perspective.

Sherman’s play is peppered with dry humour, and warmed by the fiery warmth of Rose’s spirit, which lifts the often-gruelling narrative. Regular events of almost-inconceivable violence and tragedy are delivered coldly and matter-of-factly by Lipman, but with a little force as though she is driving the shock value, anticipating the audible gasps from the audience.

Maureen Lipman’s performance is poised and dignified, and she hits all the beats of Sherman’s sharply observed, dry humour. Lipman’s performance is a remarkable study in endurance and memory, although there are points at which the production feels a little bit laboured, like watching a marathon.

This production is markedly static, with Rose confined to her bench onstage as she recounts for the audience the story of one desperate exodus after another. This boldly still direction focuses the audience on Lipman’s voice and Sherman’s words, although at two and a half hours long, this hefty monologue does pose a challenge to the audience’s attention.

Having seen the previous production, it feels as though this play sits better in the more intimate, thrust stage of the Park Theatre. Some of the personality and the human connection of this piece is lost in the towering proscenium and high-raked auditorium of the Ambassadors Theatre.

Nevertheless, this is a devastatingly timely revival of a harrowing and human piece – an enduring story of survival.

*** Three stars

Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett

Rose plays at the Ambassadors Theatre until 18 June, with tickets available here.