REVIEW - The Dybbuk at the King's Head Theatre

Sickly blue light illuminates a spitting, crying, salivating face in the area behind the audience, before the scene shifts to the conventional stage. The daring opening image of a dybbuk – an indignant dislocated soul, common in Jewish folklore – comes to stand for the excruciating tragedy of impossible love, and for director Eve Leigh’s attempt to pin down its otherworldliness.

S. Ansky’s seminal 1917 play could have been overdone gothic or sci-fi. It takes place, after all, in a world where brides can be possessed by their dead lovers, spirits give evidence in court, and pregnant women have their wombs sliced opened and filled with cats.

But despite incongruous space invader-style sound effects, Leigh uses the intimacy of the north-London theatre to highlight the pain and the poignancy rather than the spectacle of Jewish mythology.

Edward Hogg’s Chonen, a rabbinical scholar who dies of a broken heart, is wired and electrifying. Protruding veins, heavy breathing and wrung hands lend carnal urgency to his fateful devotion to Leah (Hanne Steen). Hogg illustrates the enlightenment notion of sin as God-created and therefore treasured better than the play’s earlier philosophical preamble, when weak supporting actors bandy stilted ideas back and forth.

The contrasting purity of Steen’s Leah accentuates the impossibility of her betrothal to Chonen – arranged in a pact between their fathers, now denied through class difference. When Chonen hears Leah is to marry, he drops dead and returns as a dybbuk to possess her on the eve of the wedding.

The climax is premature but impressive. Surrounded by unconvincingly aghast wedding guests, Leah and her dybbuk writhe together as if joined at the pelvis, while eerie lamplight reflects off her wedding dress. Leigh’s literal interpretation of the Hebrew term dybbuk, or ‘attachment’, uses highly physical theatre to depict the symbiosis of attraction and repulsion. The polished chorus of their chants, shrieks and moans is captivating; the audience too is possessed.

The Prospero-like figure of Rabbi Azriel (David Meyer) brings maturity to a production without a backbone, teetering on the edge of amateurism. The heavily stylised exorcism he conducts to try to sever the pair is one of the few scenes that the inadequacy of the stage set fades away.

The rest of the time, wooden forklift pallets and Torah scrolls scattered around the stage fail to recreate the gemeinschaft familiarity of the Jewish shtetl. A hotchpotch of live music – from keyboard to tribal drums and jazz guitar – is matched only by a ragbag of costumes including traditional snood headscarves, two-piece suits and ripped denim.

The Dybbuk is rough around the edges but the grave task of keeping alive the centuries-old traditions of Judaism so nearly lost during the Holocaust is realised with gripping sensitivity.

Until Feb 24, King’s Head Theatre, 115 Upper Street, Islington, N1, Tuesday to Saturday 7.30pm, Saturday and Sunday 3.30pm. £10 to £20.