Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzanek in Two Jews walk into a theatre… Photograph by Bryony Jackson.
Two Jews walk into a theatre… announces its, primarily, comedic address in its well-worn joke-opener title. Actor Brian Lipson and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek perform in a largely unscripted two-hander that freely associates history, narrative and personal biography. Lipson, the son of London-based Jew (who served in the British Army) and Obarzanek of Polish descent via Israel converse as their fathers. Unearthed like sonic reels of home-movie footage, the conversations are overgrown by a thick patina of age, experience and identity.
Within its talky – often comedic – dialogue, Lipson and Obarzanek dissect the coincidences – and asynchronies – of Jewish identity that persist over time and across generations: The Six-Day War, or June War of 1967 (‘No one knew it was gonna be 6 days – by the time we got there it was gone’) and divergent paths of migration to London and Israel. At times, these become less a point of connection than a way to impose identity on another in the persistent desire to have one’s experience – and existence – ratified. Obarzanek senior criticizes: ‘Jews like you sit in your comfortable English homes/We fought for ourselves’. Lipson senior rails against him: ‘You look like a poster for the brown shirts. You look like the fascist you are.’
The conversations traverse salient contemporary issues. Obarzanek rises, ‘we don’t even know who is coming into this country/there is no system’. He adds, ‘we immigrated here in 1958 – there was a system’; ‘we were never refugees’. Lipson intrudes ‘I think it’s time to stop the conversation’, where the silence that follows serves less a reflection, than inflection on the narration: ‘because that’s what we talked about – we talked about coming in with the refugees thing and I did’.
With the minimalism of two performers in conversation, the production has pared away anything that can be deemed inessential to depicting their experience. The series of switchbacks and flash-forwards make it difficult to scent a trail in the largely unscripted performance. Yet the production is struck through by deep reserves of silence, through which the audience come to a new knowledge, if not confrontation, with questions of identity and identification.
While the humour plays to a talky repartee between the characters, the narrative is taut to its thematic and cuts to the bone of father/son relationships. Lipson senior comments that with his son’s foray into experimental theatre, ‘he does this sort of thing to provoke me’, prompting Obarzanek senior, ‘Your son in his work is trying to get to you’, who flatlines, ‘No he makes abstract work’. The generational context also holds sway, ‘It’s a luxury’/ ‘for them its work’/’there wasn’t a moment of my adult working life that wasn’t unadulterated misery’.
Like the incipient premise of two-hander theatre, the problem of intimacy between the characters is evoked intergenerationally – it is the haunting presence of the fathers that suggest the primal need of the sons to connect with them. The sorrows and satisfactions of these public dads (women are almost entirely out of the picture) arise from drive to connect with their sons – a drive that is hard-wired. Lipson senior laments his 5-year-old son relinquishes hugging him, recalling he says he’s a ‘bit grown up for that now’.
The production is sliced through by coda of contemporary dance. Moving through the shallow set stage curtain, the characters’ movement suggests an aperture leading to another dimension. Preceded by Obarzanek’s question to Lipson senior, who died at 70, ‘So what’s it like to be dead?’, and under direction of Lucy Guerin, this coda is not misplaced but adds to the desire to commune that is at the heart of production.
This is a small, almost private production shared with an intimate audience. But the two characters create a potent dramatic pair on stage. It is a kind of ‘automatic’ relationship made manifold by the interloping of the conversations as their fathers that grows the performance through the myriad of dramatic, historic and biographic developments. Lipson and Obarzanek locate residues of what has been passed through on to those who remain, transmitting a deep desire to commune with each other.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
Two Jews walk into a theatre…
Deviser/performer: Brian Lipson & Gideon Obarzanek
Director & Choreographer: Lucy Guerin
Lighting design: Bosco Shaw
Producer: Wendy Lasica
Music: Oren Ambarchi
Arts House, North Melbourne
23-28 August 2016
