"[Leo's] meticulous reading of the script also gave me more insights into the plot arc and the different characters" - Sonia Gollance

JW3, 6th March 2024

Miryeml is a rather extraordinary play.

In it, a group of Jewish refugees fleeing an unknown state gather in various temporary safe places. The focus is on the children, especially Miryeml, whose strange ruminations increasingly become prophecies. By the end, she leads the children on a doomed walk towards Jerusalem.

This was my first collaboration with Sonia Gollance, the translator of the Yiddish play, and member of UCL's Hebrew and Jewish Studies department. As ever, working with an academic was a pleasure, offering insights into the play, its context, and engaging in lively discussions about how it related to other styles across its elongated writing period.

For it was started in the 1920s, and finished in 1958. Responding both to interwar pogroms and the Holocaust, integrating history, folk tradition, and childhood, it's a vast play in both length (14 scenes, with a runtime in full of about 3-and-a-bit hours) and scope (child refugees, trauma, lost cultures, asylum bureaucracy...).

This posed interesting directorial challenges. Should it be treated as a symbolist work, for it certainly has strands in common? Or is it modernist? Realist with an interest in childish imaginings?

In the end, the all-female ensemble conjured something that was larger-than-life, and used that sense of play to shift between many different characters. In our current age, we made something rather special in this play's first outing.

I do owe an apology: having squeaked in on time in rehearsal, during the actual show things ran slower than expected, and I had to make brutal cuts to the second half in the interval.

Heloïse Lowenthal (MIRYEML)

Em Lawrence (TSIRELE)

Sarah Boneysteele (ROKHELE / BOBE / MOTHER / MADAM PRESIDENT / FEMALE PEDDLER)

Hannah Bristow (MOTELE / SHOLEM)

Alexis Peterman (BOREKHL / BUTCHER'S WIFE / FEMALE CUSTOMER / LANDLADY)

Tamara Micner (LEYZERL / BUTCHER / SCRIBE / KHAYIML)

Kaeridwyn Eftelya (DOVIDL / MEYLEKHL / RABBI / SHIFRELE / YENKL / REFUGEE MAN)

Laura Wohlwend (MENAKHEML / BLIMELE / CANTOR )