Love take flight

Jamieson who was partly inspired to write the piece after he and Rice worked with the Polish physical theatre company Gardzienice in the late 1980s. They visited many villages in an area which was Polish but is now part of Belarus.

“Some of the villages we went to had a Catholic or Russian Orthodox identity,” remembers Jamieson. “But it felt like a third of each village had been removed, and left a hole. There was a kind of sheepish, guilty shrug when you would ask if there were remnants of Jewish life there.”

There’s a scene in the play when Bella, a talented writer who wrote in Yiddish, is seen reading a passage form her memoir Burning Lights. She was living in New York at the time and had largely abandoned her writing to support her husband. But she picked up her pen when news of her community’s destruction reached her. She wrote of her childhood in Vitebsk.

“Before she starts reading [in the play] she has arranged shoes across the stage and each pair has a book between them,” says Jamieson. “It’s a beautiful and very subtly mournful section - a metaphor of the whole Jewish population of eastern Europe departing. There’s not just a sense of loss for those who died but of migration and of those endless journeys.”

The narrative also takes in Chagall’s rise and fall within Russia and the country’s art scene, says Jamieson.

“The revolution was important not just for Jews in Russia but because artistically. The avantgarde became the new institution overnight. Chagall was thrust right to the top of the artistic establishment and invited to be Commissar of Fine Art. He turned it down on Bella’s advice, very wisely. It was as if she knew that those who were swept up and elevated by these huge events could just as easily be crushed by them.

“So Chagall set up an art school in Vitebsk which within two or three years was taken over by terrible in-fighting. And then his work was deemed unacceptable as proletarian art, as socialist art veered off towards social realism.”

Neither Rice or Jamieson are Jewish. And their priority was to reflect Chagall’s work with integrity, rather than authentically capture shtetl life. Still, they remember with laughter how they went to a visit to what they describe as Jewish archives in north London. It was in 1990 and they can’t remember exactly where. But they do remember having to go through endless security checks.

When they were eventually shown to a room they asked for source material showing shtetl life. The archivist handed them a box. Inside was a video of Fiddler on the Roof. “Everything you need to know is in there,” they were told.

“I have to say I have watched it al lot,” laughs Rice as rehearsals resume. “So you’ll probably find that there’s some Fiddler in the play too.”

There was a sheepish, guilty shrug when you asked about Jewish life

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is Shakespeare’s Globe from June 16 - July 2. It then travels to Southampton and Cornwall.