Rose
www.streamtheatrenow.com/rose-the-play

Revivals of plays often coincide with the centenary of premiere or playwright, but the Hope Mill Theatre’s new video-streamed production of Martin Sherman’s monologue, Rose, is a rare example of a restaging marking the 100th birthday of its character.

Rose, a role created at the National Theatre in 1999 by Olympia Dukakis, was born in 1920, in a part of the Ukraine that, she notes, was made famous by the musical Fiddler on the Roof and then notorious through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

This script is one of the three most-revived works of Sherman, an American but London-based dramatist whose own eighty-second birthday falls next month. The others are Bent (1979), dealing with the treatment of those Germans hated twice by the Nazis for being Jewish and gay, and Messiah (1984), set in the seventeenth century on the border of Ukraine and Poland, where the citizens, during Cossack clearances, become convinced a local rabbi is Jesus Christ returned to Earth.