Red Kettle Theatre Company represented for one night at Garter Lane their 2003 production of Martin Sherman’s Rose, a two act monologue about an eighty-year-old Jewish lady reminiscing on a park bench about her past as she does “Shiva” – a mourning period or Judaist sharing of grief by remembering. A, lest we forgot the terrible things of the Holocaust and our memories will teach us our moral duty to be good. A very static piece, it has a lot of kvetching or complaining, of sadness and interminable hardship leavened with a good dose of wry laughter and ruefulness as Rose, wonderfully played by Waterford-born actress Fiona York. At times it is difficult to have any empathy with this static character and her weary wisecracks cannot mask the polemic or political set of points, Sherman is making.
