New Musical 'Imagine This' in Plymouth Lacks Imagination

Often musicals or plays that deal with highly emotive subjects can be accused of taking themselves too seriously and run the risk of becoming pretentious. The problem with the new musical "Imagine This" is that it perhaps does not take itself seriously enough. Set in the Warsaw Ghetto during the winter of 1942, where a group of Jewish actors attempt to perform a musical play about the last stand of the Jewish Zealots at Masada in 70 A.D., it has the potential to be a genuinely powerful piece of musical theatre. But the world premiere production at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth fails to achieve that potential.

The central character, Daniel Warshowky, is a theatre director who assembles a group of friends and close family as the cast of a production that he hopes can serve to inspire fellow members of the Ghetto to imagine a world far from the horrors and deprivation of their Nazi controlled environment. His choice of subject is one of the most famous events in Jewish history - when 960 Jews led by Eleazar ben Yair decided to commit mass suicide at the fortress on the top of the rock of Masada rather than surrender to the might of the Roman Tenth Legion. When a member of the Ghetto's resistance fighters, Adam, seeks refuge at the theatre, he (somewhat incredibly) assumes a leading role - that of the Roman commander, Silva - in the Masada play. Then the musical switches back and forth between the story of the Ghetto theatricals and the Masada play, with actors/actresses playing dual roles in both stories.

Unfortunately it never really works. There are far too many long, overblown, somewhat irrelevant episodes in the Masada sections, especially a rather silly sub-plot with Silva's slave that attempts comic relief and achieves camp boredom. Glenn Berenbeim's Book often lacks the subtlety of sub-text that such a weighty and delicate subject requires, while Timothy Sheader's direction fails to give the piece any real sense of pace. And the rather awkward looking Roman and Jewish Zealot chorus members attempting to perform Adam Cooper's choreography are reminiscent of 1930s amateur operatic companies on a bad day.

On the plus side, Shuky Levi has provided the show with a powerful and at times really beautiful score (though I found the score more effective on listening to the CD than I did in the theatre). Ruari Murchison's set design creates an effective backdrop to the action. And there are some fine performances - notably from Stephen Ashfield as Adam/Silva and the magnificent Peter Polycarpou as Daniel/Eleazar.

During the last fifteen minutes or so of the show it finally seems to find its focus, when the threat of evacuations to the concentration camp at Treblinka at first persuades the Ghetto thespians to mimic their ancient Zealot counterparts by committing suicide on stage in front of their Nazi oppressors. However, in a final act of defiance, they eventually decide against suicide and accept their fate at the hands of the Germans, choosing to "die on our feet rather than live on our knees". The final rendition of the show's wonderful title song by the entire cast produces a glorious sound that is both inspiring and chilling.

The ending of the show is really quite stunning, which begs the question of how great a show it could be if it had that level of emotion and dramatic focus from the outset. It needs a major rewrite - but, with the right sense of direction, I can "Imagine" how great a show this could still be.

Robert Gould