Sweet taste of success that has been lost in translation
The Space on the Mile
TODAY IS the first performance of this year’s only Israeli play at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s an hour-long comical whimsy directed with a skilful, light touch by Ariella Eshed whose Tiksho-ret theatre company nobly exists to stage Israeli plays in the UK. This can’t be easy in a country whose arts establishment often sees Israel as the “anti” cause of choice.
Written by Gur Koren, the action is set in Tel Aviv. The hapless hero is a drama teacher — also called Gur (Tom Slatter) — whose late grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, makes contact with Gur by possessing the people he comes into contact with.
The reason this dead man makes several forays from afterlife to life relates to a forthcoming memoir about his Holocaust experience. He and his Jewish friend from the same town once attempted to smuggle sugar into the eastern Polish town of Bialystok. When the two men were stopped by police, one friend escaped while the other — Gur’s grandfather — was jailed for two months. Schindler’s List, it ain’t but the book, written by the grandson of the friend who escaped, makes no mention of Gur’s grandfather and so, understandably, he’s upset and persuades Gur to contact the author to ensure the memoir recognises his contribution to the story.
I happen to have been to Bialystok. It’s the gateway to a part of Poland defined by slow-moving rivers, vast forests and some of the cruellest massacres of Jews during the Holocaust, not just by the occupying Germans but by the Polish population. Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s play Our Class is set in the region and based on one such atrocity. So if you have that context in mind (and admittedly most won’t) it’s somewhat of a relief and perhaps a surprise to find that this 2009 comedy (a long runner at Tel Aviv’s Gesher Theatre) is much more focused on exploring the comedy of being contacted by the dead.
Koren’s neat conceit requires two of Eshed’s cast of four to play not only the characters Gur encounters in life — among them, a student, a waitress, a taxi driver and a prostitute — but the moment when each of them is possessed by his grandfather. These brief invasions of a stranger’s body by the spirit of Gur’s genial granddad form the backbone of the play. And this well acted production bowls entreatingly along with a wry sideways glance about the nature of afterlife studded by some genuinely funny moments, not least when Gur can’t be sure if the prostitute with whom he is having a sordid encounter in a Tel Aviv street is, deep down, his grandfather.
But, in catering to UK audiences, some of the comedy appears to be lost in translation. When Boris Johnson’s name comes up, it’s clearly an attempt by Eshed, who also translates, to make the joke work as well in the UK as it might in Israel. Actually it just feels incongruous in a play so conspicuously set in Tel Aviv.
More problematically, a cornerstone of Koren’s plot involves the gay author of the memoir falling for our straight hero in a way that gay men traditionally did in British sitcoms of the 1970s — and even then only to give the straight hero an amusing dilemma. It might have been amusing then; now it just feels dreadfully old school and somewhat unreconstructed.
None of this prevents 5 Kilo Sugar from being in the main enjoyable and with occasional laugh-out-loud moments. But those waiting for Tiksho-ret to prove that Israeli drama deserves more recognition than it gets in this country, will, at least on this evidence, have to keep waiting.