The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk

Daniel Jamieson

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786822871
• eBook ISBN: 9781786822888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Partners in life and on canvas, Marc and Bella are immortalised as the picture of romance. But whilst on canvas they flew, in life they walked through some of the most devastating times in history. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk traces this young couple as they navigate the Pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and each other. Woven throughout with music and dance inspired by Russian Jewish tradition. Winner of the 2017 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award, the highest honour at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Act one

(MARC CHAGALL, an old man, sits on stage drawing in a little sketch book. His telephone rings and reluctantly he answers it.)

MARC: Hello?

FRANZ: Marc? It’s me, Franz. I just wanted to go back to something we talked about this morning – would you agree that the iconography of your paintings resonates more as a complex chord, in which the immediately evident is instantaneously harmonised into a host of sublimated visions, as Breton put it in ’41, that you give ‘metaphor…plastic support in hypnagogic and eidetic imagery’?

Marc? …Marc? What do you think?

MARC: Sorry… Was that a question?

FRANZ: Yes. Do you agree?

MARC: Yes…

FRANZ: Are you sure?

MARC: Yes. Hypna… Yes.

FRANZ: Alright. Now, an image – a recurring image – in your work is, of course, that of aerial lovers whose joy manifests itself in an almost palpable… frisson of colours and planes on the canvas. And yet, in their ecstasy, their attitude is somehow not exclusive. Their image becomes a kind of banner of spiritual potentiality under which everyone can march, even the sick at heart…

MARC: (Interrupting.) Franz, Franz… ‘Banners’? ‘Marching’…?

Franz, do you know why people paint?

FRANZ: Well… lots of reasons I suppose…

(MARC leaves the telephone hanging by its cord.)

FRANZ: Marc…? Marc….?

(MARC rummages out a postcard and holds it up to the audience.)

MARC: That’s Vitebsk, my hometown, in 1914.

Two cathedrals, it had! And sixty synagogues…

(It’s a black and white photograph of a town of many steeples over a river.)

You know, they flattened it in the war, the Nazis – they pounded it to dust. And for those that never knew it, this is all that remains – black and white postcards…

FRANZ: (Faintly.) Marc, are you alright?

MARC: When some things are gone you thirst for their details in such a heart-breaking way… you feel an agony of need to remember… Perhaps the smell of a room in a house that has been razed to the ground for twenty years…

(He looks at the postcard.)

Shall I tell you a secret? In I914, Vitebsk wasn’t black and white at all!

(He shuts his eyes.)

The light was actually green in my eyes! And gold! And sometimes faintly lilac!

The air… smelt of dung! Because we all kept cows in our back yards! What else? I can smell… cinnamon in something baking… and smoke from the lamp – that wick needs a trim… and Mamma is frying fishballs…

(We hear fish frying, and other sounds. MARC recognises each like an old friend. We hear a watery rumble.)

My God, you know what that is don’t you?! The samovar just starting to bubble!

(A clock ticks.)

That’s our old clock, spending time like it had no end of it…

(A young woman begins to hum a song.)

That… that’s Bella! Extraordinary! How like a girl she sounds! I suppose she almost was in 1914… You know, when she left school she was one of the four brightest students in all Russia! And for some reason, she took an interest in me…

(BELLA enters, singing playfully. She decides to confide in us.)

BELLA: Let me tell you about the first time I saw him. I’d gone to visit my friend, Thea, who’s the daughter of our doctor. I waited two minutes on the doorstep before she answered the door to me. Then, for some reason, her face was red and shiny as a freshly washed radish! I barged in and plopped down onto a leather-bound sofa in her father’s waiting room and began chattering on about some nonsense or other. But she was behaving very oddly… She shifted from foot to foot as if she needed to pay a visit and she seemed constantly on the verge of tittering in a high voice and floating up into the chandelier. And every few moments she stole a glance at the door of her father’s surgery. So, Thea Brachman, who are you hiding away from me in there?

(A young MARC appears.)

My toes were as roots into the floor. Sheets of bluish flame rippled silently along the walls and ceiling and leapt into my hair.

His eyes. So blue. Splinters of heaven! They shot into me like arrows into a tree and made all my leaves quiver. Now I remembered Thea has already talked about him. He is a Jewish painter. He must encounter such misunderstanding here in sleepy Vitebsk. We must befriend him, she said. He needed models with open minds. Nude models…

(He steps forward. BELLA looks about to swoon.)

I was already running away, only I hadn’t moved yet. ‘Thea, I must go home…’

MARC: Why?

BELLA: he said,

MARC: You have such a beautiful smile, I want to draw you.

BELLA: Draw me? He was killing me! He’d climbed inside me and was running along beside me. My face was now all shiny radishes like Thea’s. I looked down at the floor and saw my feet stepping onto the cobbles outside.

It seems as if we were courting the very next day. I remember sitting on a fallen tree by the river with him.

(MARC and she sit side by side. She shuts her eyes.)

We were too frightened to kiss, and yet I possessed with a passion the hea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Kneehigh
• Bristol Old Vic
• Act One
• Act Two