Yentl Tickets

If you think you know Yentl from the soupy 1983 Barbra Streisand musical movie, think again, because the Australian version of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, which arrives at Marylebone Theatre this week, trailing awards and a string of ecstatic five-star reviews, offers a startlingly modern take on the story of the girl living in 19th-century Poland. Yentl yearns to do the things men are allowed to do and so disguises herself as a boy in a quest for knowledge and self-discovery.

Kadimah Yiddish Theatre’s richly textured production, which takes its visual cues from Expressionism and is partly performed in Yiddish (with English surtitles), unlocks the queer subtext of Singer’s original. It offers an enticing world of dybbuks, golems and ghosts but also a startlingly contemporary spin on identity and self-knowledge. Time Out Australia described it as “fierce, luminous and utterly exhilarating."

“When people think of Yentl, if they think of it at all, they often think of Streisand and Mandy Patinkin, but in Singer’s story they are teenagers on the cusp of self-discovery and full of raging hormones and sexual desire,” says Elise Hearst, the Melbourne-based Jewish writer who is one of the co-writers of the play. 

“I think it speaks to a contemporary audience because it is really delving into the true nature of a person’s soul and wrestling with what happens if you don’t feel your soul and body match each other.” Those are questions that many young people face growing up but which weren’t talked about over 60 years ago when Singer’s story—originally written in Yiddish—was translated into English and published. 

“Back then people didn’t talk about these things,” says Hearst. "There was no public discourse, but now we can openly have those conversations about queer and trans rights, so it feels very modern as we watch Yentl and the desperation which propels her forward.”