Rose. Ambassadors Theatre.

Rose, the eponymous protagonist of Martin Sherman’s haunting, epoch-spanning monologue is sitting shiva. It is not clear until the play closes for whom the 80-year-old is mourning as she rests on a wooden bench, with only water, pill-bottles, and a freezer box for company. One of the many medications the Miami-retiree takes is for her chest. “At my age, breathing is one of the few pleasures I have left”, she says. Another is for cholesterol. She can only manage to swallow that one between gulps of full-fat, peanut-butter ice-cream. “That”, she briskly points out, “is an irony not lost on me”. It is a gentle piece of sardonic wit, one of many in a Sherman’s pithy script, delivered with unexpected restraint by a melancholy and vividly reflective Maureen Lipman. What lies, canyon-like behind Rose’s wry, unsentimental humour, is a devastating tale of loss, courage, and survival, set against the horrors of the Holocaust. One wonders mid-way though how this character can bear to remember, let alone crack jokes.

First produced in 1999, this revival remains as relevant now as then. Rose lays out her life story as a kind of shiva-sitting for those she has lost, and for those who continue to suffer brutality. Born in 1920 in a shtetl in rural Ukraine, she is a precocious child “pretentious in several languages at once” whose mother takes in washing and sells fruit to survive. Her sickly father rarely gets out of bed, his voluminous pill-popping foreshadowing Rose’s medical habits in later life. “If you have your first period and your first pogrom in the same month, you can safely assume childhood is over,” is how she recalls the antisemitic Cossack attack on her village that finally does her ailing father in. As a 17-year old she follows a sibling to Warsaw, meets Yussul, the love of her life, and bears a child named Esther. The family look on indifferently as the Nazis march into Poland, “How much worse could the Germans be?” she asks, thinking back to the senseless spite of the Cossacks. Much worse it transpires.

Rose manages to find work in a canning factory outside the Warsaw Jewish ghetto. It is from a window there, one evening, she watches German bombs burn the city to ashes. Her daughter murdered and her husband seemingly transported to a death camp, she manages to survive only by hiding in the sewers. When the Russians enter Poland, she escapes on a train west and finds a space on creaking exodus ship to Palestine. More brutality follows, this time at the hands of the British who, determined to keep Jews from emigrating, turn the ship back to Europe. A dopey American sailor named Sonny saves her from exile to the Soviet Union and brings her to a new life in Atlantic City, where the sidewalks reek of “aspirin and chicken fat”. Another child follows, as do grandchildren and another husband. But the brutality does not cease. This time, however, it is her Israeli-based grandson meting it out to Palestinian villagers.

At one point in her new life in America Rose seeks to summon up the dybbuk, or disembodied spirit, of her supposedly dead first love Yussul. She dyes her hair, adopts his mannerisms, and demands he inhabits her physically like some kind of benign demonic visitation. This is rather how Lipman approaches playing Rose; she is her own kind of dybbuk, almost entirely occupied by her character in a way one rarely sees on stage. In the show’s overlong and exposition-heavy second half the sheer intimacy of Lipman’s performance might get lost. It never does however: this is a tour-de-force demonstration of almost peerless expertise in the art of monologue.

Scott Le Crass directs with a canny ability to bring out the best from Lipman’s gestures and enunciation. Julian Starr’s shrewd sound design gently hints at events Rose describes without ever being intrusive. The same cannot be said of Jane Lalljee’s lighting which is way too busy. David Shields’ set design jars, too. It seems to be aiming at evoking the opening of pages in a storybook but ends up looking rather like the reception area of a plush Miami spa. Minor production gripes aside, this Rose demands to be seen.

Writer:  Martin Sherman

Director: Scott Le Crass