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| The monster of the Jewish ghetto
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Photo: © Bellamy / 1d-photo.org
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A new play adapts the famous legend of Golem, the masterpiece of Yiddish literature.
Every 33 years the Golem wakes up in Prague’s ghetto. This fantastic creature, a red clay monster comes to life through a magic spell pronounced by a rabbi with great powers...
In Hebrew, Golem means “shapeless mass." It was created by the magic art of Rabbi Judah Loew who is said to have created a Golem out of clay to protect the Jewish community of the Prague ghetto during the 16th century.
The medieval legend is also mentioned in the Talmud where it is said that Adam was considered a Golem, a body without soul, for the first twelve hours of his existence.
The Golem legend has inspired countless artists, including the Gustav Meyrink and Isaac Bashevis Singer and film director Paul Wegener.
In 1915, Gustav Meyrink, one of the masters of European fantastic writing, based his book “The Golem” on the legend, setting his narrative in the 18th century.
The novel begins with a dream. The novel’s hero is Athanasius Pernath, a jeweller from the Prague ghetto, who loses his memory. He is surrounded by a number of odd neighbours: the evil junk dealer Aaron Wassertrum, the doomed student Charousek, the friendly Hillel, whose daughter Miriam will become Pernath’s amorous fantasy, the adulterer Angelina, to whom Pernath feels strangely attracted too, and the lascivious Rosina, the ghetto’s young prostitute.
He goes off in search on a spiritual quest for identity, a quest that leads him to the Golem, a creature with uncontrollable powers…
In this atmospheric story, the monster terrorizing the streets of Prague is inextricably bound up with the psyche of the people who live there.
“The Golem” both materialises the collective soul of ghetto and explores personal identity, memory, and indefinable frontiers between dream and reality, between frenzy and reason, and between wish and fate.
The importance of images
The play’s direction has a very strong visual presence and gives to the production a dramaturgical dimension.
“We have abandoned the text a bit with its fantastic and detective episodes to give priority to the image. The actors perform with masks, puppets and sounds,” explains David Girondin Moab
But the play stays true to its essence: the mysterious atmosphere that often lays an emphasis on this parabole with gripping pictures around the barely touched upon story of Golem.
“The Golem”, an adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s book created by the Cie Pseudonymo runs until 11 April at the Theatre Gerard Philipe de Saint-Denis, Centre dramatique National. Tel: 00 33 1 48 13 70 00
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