PATRICK MARMION on theatre: Forget Beattie on the phone, 'Rose' is Maureen ... trends now

Rose (Ambassador's Theatre, London)

Verdict: Dame Maureen Rises

Rating:

Can it be that Maureen Lipman is still best known for the BT phone ads more than 30 years ago? The ones where she glowed over a grandson who'd be studying an 'ology' at university?

Now 77, she has been far from idle since. But little or nothing has been as challenging or riveting as Martin Sherman's one-person, two-hour-plus show about an 80-year-old Jewish refugee recalling her life through the 20th century, first seen in 1999 at the National Theatre starring Olympia Dukakis.

Lipman now takes the role of Rose, who grew up in a 1920s shtetl in Eastern Ukraine. Her story is a Biblical yarn in which she is an Ashkenazi Jewish everywoman mourning the Holocaust, exile and hopes for a homeland. Her story is told, pointedly, looking back from the end of the millennium, as Rose sits shiva (the Jewish custom of holding a wake) for all her relatives and ancestors.

We hear of Yossel, the red-headed, ear-ringed love of her life and their child Esther, killed in the confusion of a soup kitchen in the Warsaw ghetto under Nazi occupation.

Evading the death camps by hiding in sewers, she meets lovable American klutz Sonny on a botched people-smuggling operation into Palestine, and they settle instead in Atlantic City, New Jersey, also known as 'Warsaw On Sea'.

But her dream of one day finding a home in Israel is poisoned by war and politics in a country where she discovers that speaking Yiddish has become a joke.

And it's a tale shot through with bitter truths of experience which call for reflections on the nature of God: 'Like a policeman, he's never there when you want him.'

Performed sitting on a wooden shiva bench, Scott Le Crass's production is inevitably static, but the symbolism of that bench is not to be underestimated — any more than the grey smock, reminiscent of a concentration camp uniform.

Framed by a grey mane of Lion King hair, Lipman's sad eyes and sardonic smile, exhausted by a century of suffering, do the heavy lifting. It's a performance of a lifetime, distilling the history of an entire people. It deserves to eclipse those ads.

Great Expectations (Garrick Theatre) 

Verdict: Is 'ard not to love it

Rating:

The life of Eddie Izzard has had ups and downs of its own.

Born in Aden and moving all over the world, the actor, comedian and marathon runner (who prefers to be known as she, and be called Suzy) lost her mother when she was six.

Now we find Izzard doing a spellbinding solo turn in Charles Dickens's saga of self-discovery, Great Expectations. It's a loving, camp, fast-moving synopsis of the book, told from the ever-shifting point of view of the orphaned hero, Pip.

Breezing through a gallery of gothic characters, conjured with a nod, a glance and a gurgle, Izzard's forte is Pip as a child, pulling faces behind the teeming characters' backs.

Adapted by (brother) Mark Izzard, the show revels in Dickens's language. We hear of fish-faced Pumblechook whose hair 'looked like it was arranged by a dying relative', and menacing Magwitch, who is so hungry that 'had I brought any appetite to the table, he would have eaten that, too'.

Izzard's theatrical persona is pure Dickens as well (despite sporting the highlight-hairdo of a middle-aged woman keen not to let herself go).

Trotting about the bare-board stage beneath swooping velvet curtains, Izzard never sentimentalises Dickens's idiom or overloads it with Simon Callow's Christmas pudding locution.

But the cunning thing is how that insouciance belies the teetering weight of plot — allowing the two-hour tale to creep up on us and mug us, in much the same way it does Pip.

A Midsummer Night's love tangle that's half dream, half nightmare

By Georgina Brown 

A Midsummer Night's Dream

read more from dailymail.....