The new Yentl has a new character – and it is the surprising star role

She does not play the title character Yentl, Avigdor the Yeshiva boy of Yentl’s affections or Hodes, the Jewish girl in a love triangle with both of them. But as The Figure, a character who never made it into Barbra Streisand’s film, Evelyn Krape gets more stage time than any of the three principals in a hotly anticipated new stage production of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story.

“I’m a presence in all but one scene; I have to stay very focussed,” says the 76-year-old actress, who is also the artistic director of the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre.  It’s this Melbourne theatre’s production, telling the ultimate Jewish cross-dressing story in Yiddish as well as English, which is now in London in March by way of the Sydney Opera House.

Don’t come expecting a musical, though – Australia’s most famous performance venue hosts straight theatre as well as concerts. But this Yentl is arguably truer than Streisand’s to Singer’s original. Krape says the author’s stories were full of spirit figures like the “evil inclination” hovering over Yentl’s every move, from her pursuit of forbidden-to-females Torah study to her exploration of love, until being exorcised by a Yentl who has finally found herself.

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“Singer’s work is populated by dybbuks and imps – it’s steeped in the Kabbalah,” says Krape.

“At first we imagined this spirit character might be an older version of Yentl, wandering the earth having rejected her community because she couldn’t be the person she wanted to be. But really I’m Yentl’s conscience, egging her on and taunting her – this character is not simply inhabiting her but giving her the strength to say ‘do what you need to do’.

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“I play lots of other roles – Hodes’s mother, Yentl’s father, the yeshiva bocher – but I am most provokingly attached to Yentl.”

When the original Kadimah, first point of call for Jewish migrants to Melbourne as an information point and cultural centre since 1911, lent its name to a professional  offshoot – the Kadmiah Yiddish Theatre, founded in 2019 – Krape, upon being appointed artistic director, felt strongly that Yentl should be one of its first productions.

“I felt that not only Jews knew about it but non-Jews too because of Streisand’s film, but it took a couple of years for our little company to develop before the two years we’ve been performing it in Australia.”

Once brought to the table as a project by Krape, she took part in the creative development alongside Gary Abrahams, the Kadimah Theatre’s executive director who was the principal writer as well as directing the play. A big part of this was how to superimpose Singer’s supernatural character onto the action: “I thought originally it might be a design thing, with puppets flying through the air,” admits Krape.

But although she relished the concept of The Figure, Abrahams came up with as “a character I could get my teeth into”, she had no expectations of creating a star vehicle for herself. “I always thought I should be in the play, but Gary tried out different kinds of actors before realising he needed me – which I was very pleased about!”

Given the non-binary quality of The Figure, as male as it is female, Krape insisted on a moustache as part of her costume: “but I don’t try and hide my bosoms, either. I’m the essence of what I think the play is really about – if Singer was writing it today, Yentl might be trans,” she suggests. “Her father articulates it by saying ‘you were born in a woman’s body but with the soul of a man’ – because, as Singer puts it, ‘sometimes God makes mistakes’.”

Debuting the production at the prestigious Melbourne Arts Centre gave it a great head start, says Krape. “It attracted both a Jewish and a non-Jewish audience. Our answer to those who asked what the point was of coming to a play in a language they didn’t understand was: ‘You go to operas performed In Italian, Russian or French, you see surtitles and you accept them.’  You see surtitles in our play too, which is largely in Yiddish.

“A lot of Jews came who didn’t think they would come, and being at the Arts Centre gave it a status.  It speaks both to Jews in a very tight community, which has the most Holocaust survivors after Israel – Melbourne is like a shtetl, although some don’t feel they belong in the religious world around them – and to an LGBTQ+ community.”

Yiddish, in which Krape has been performing since 2011 alongside her projects in English, which include voicing a wise old sheep in Babe, has run in her blood since birth. It was the only language in which her mother, who emigrated to Melbourne at the age of five, could communicate with her father, who was 27 when he arrived speaking only Polish. “They didn’t encourage my brother or me to speak it, but there was a lot of singing of Yiddish songs at home.”

Love for the language has stayed strong throughout Jewish Melbourne, she says . The Kadimah Yiddish Theatre is not only next to the city’s Holocaust Museum but down the road from the Sholem Aleichem school, which teaches in Yiddish as well as English, and a new Jewish arts centre will soon be moving into the Kadimah’s building. “We’re so concentrated in one area, we’re steeped in Yiddishkeit, moving towards creating a Jewish arts quarter.”

Since the Bondi massacre, the focus in Australia on fighting antisemitism is “huge”, she adds, and she is looking forward to telling more of the Australian Jewish stories she has performed in the past. More contemporary ones, too “although, in spite of being set in the 1870s, our production of Yentl is a contemporary piece of theatre. For me it has been from the outset about keeping a culture alive, keeping a language alive and talking to as broad an audience as we can”.

Read our review of Yentl here.

Yentl is at the Marylebone Theatre until 12 April.  marylebonetheatre.com