Bonjour Monsieur Chagall

Yesterday we have been to the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw to attand the play Bonjour Monsieur Chagall. And we absolutely loved it!

The concept of the play is based on Chagall's paintings - it comes to live, the heroes of the stories painted dance, sing, play..... It is as taken out of the fairytale. The play itself is in Yiddish with simultaneous translation into Polish but tell the true, the translation, though welcome, is not absolutely necessary and there were longish moments when I wasn't using it at all. As what IS important is this recreation of the world long gone, of the mix of fairytale and nightmare from Chagall's paintings, of Witebsk from the time of his youth....

Marc Chagall had a long life in this cursed, interesting, nightmarish XX century. Born and raised in tsarist Russia at the time of pogroms, coming from a very poor Jewish family, married into the wealthy one (and with love!), a witness to the revolution, its soon dying hopes, lucky to escape Bolshevik purges and settled in Paris, evacueted from there by Americans when Nazi treat became obvious he made it to New York through Spain.... But after the war he returned to Paris. All these stories from the world long gone, from the hopes long forgotten can be retrieved in his paintings. And it can be seen in this play (BTW in Paris it atracted few thousand people).

The additional strong impression is made by the word of introduction spoken by Simon Szurmiej, the author of the play and an elderly man who used to know Chagall, talk to him, discuss his paintings, his poetry, his attitudes, and the result is the play, coming back after 30 years (it was first played before Chagall's death). Listening to Mr Szurmiej's recollection of his talks with Marc Chagall, of the explanation of the paintings, anecdotes behind them, listening to his beautiful Polish and equally beautiful Yiddish I had this rare impression of touching important piece of history revealled in front of my eyes to stay in my memory for ever.