Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Like eating 58 luxury chocolates: The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk reviewed

Plus: The Kids Are Alright wants to be a moving deconstruction of parental loss but the story is impossible to follow and the characters are threadbare

Marc Antolin as Marc Chagall and Audrey Brisson as Bella Chagall in The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. Image: Steve Tanner

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk begins with a phone conversation between a pretentious art critic and a man called Marc. This turns out to be Marc Chagall, the expressionist painter, who was born in Vitebsk in Belarus in 1887. It would have been helpful to include his name in the title.

Emma Rice, the director, relies on her usual blend of dances, songs and pretty lighting to tell her tale. She has very low expectations of her audience. The sad characters cry. The happy characters laugh. The amorous characters dance rapturously. Everyone sings a lot. The script consists mainly of plot points written in clunky, airless prose. ‘It was the best exhibition I’ve ever had,’ announces Marc after an early success in Berlin. ‘Now I can go back to Russia with my head held high.’ He seduces a model, Bella, but dumps her and moves to Paris in search of fame. ‘Four years he’s been gone,’ she mopes, ‘and he writes hardly at all.’ Then he marches back into town with a marriage proposal. ‘My knowing you has always seeped backwards as well as forwards in time,’ he says, perhaps trying to imitate in words the swirly, mystical texture of his dreamscapes.

‘I hate St Petersburg. It’s so cold,’ he says perceptively

Marc comes across as a restless attention seeker who seems well suited to the clingy, simpering Bella. When war breaks out in 1914, he’s saved from the draft by a relative who finds him a desk job in St Petersburg. But he’s not remotely grateful. ‘I hate St Petersburg. It’s so cold,’ he says perceptively. Meanwhile Bella pines away at home listening to the leaky roof while talking to the clock. ‘Each tick is an uphill struggle,’ she says. A fair summary of the show. Later we learn that she’s a gifted writer who studied drama under Stanislavski and read philosophy and literature at university.

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