Who is permitted to stop wandering?

Who can find rest in these fraught times? The dead? Or do they remain haunted by past experience and the possibility of future trauma?

In Jewish tradition, some souls are condemned to wander the earth, wrenched from body to body until they have learned and relearned the lessons of their lives.

The Gilgul is set in the rooms of the Chevra Kadisha. A feather is floated above the dead man’s nose to ensure that no breath remains before burial. But the ghost of the man just interred is there, waiting to tell his story. And we wait with the shomer, whose job is to watch the dead transition to the grave and watch with mounting tension as the tale unfolds.

The Gilgul, developed by Dr Myer Taub and Aliza Levi, who have worked together as Blizzard Productions through the years, is masterful. Hosted and performed at The Goldstone Gallery, Dr Myer Taub, a doyen of theatre visiting from South Africa, embodies nine successive characters with grave physicality and precision. He is as convincing as a leech as he is as the gilgul himself: from donkey to banker, from cantor to critic. “Gilgul, Gilgul, Gilgul Ha’neshamot. The circle of souls; the circle of souls.”

Through dark humour, we are brought face to face with the contrast between the gilgul’s corrupted appetites and the shomer’s modest search for safety—the security of home so often denied to Jews across history.

The Gilgul is based on a Yiddish short story by A. B. Gotlober (1811–1899). The encounter takes place in the preparation room of a Jewish burial society, where a shomer meets a wandering soul condemned to repeated reincarnation. The device is simultaneously comic and severe. With each new life comes the apparent possibility of escape or moral repair, yet the same impulses return in altered form. The question gradually shifts from “Who will this soul become next?” to the more troubling: “Can human beings ever escape the desires and injuries that travel with them?”

And at the end, we return to the unassuming shomer, who displays none of the gilgul’s extravagance. His desires are more grounded and his concerns more profound. He seeks neither prestige, gluttonous abundance nor finery. He wants only safety and the security of home.

This play is oddly prescient—a play for our times. Its preoccupations with death, Jewish restlessness, fear and the desire to be grounded in one place resonate powerfully.

Melbourne director Aliza Levi brings discipline and dramatic shape to the material. Under Levi’s direction, Taub’s body becomes the story: the production’s scenery, costume and principal dramatic instrument.

Levi’s history as an artist, provides a distinctly sculptural element to her direction. The staging is stark and architectural, with plinths marking the sites of different lives. Some of the production’s most majestic moments are framed by an archway providing a stage within a stage as well as turning the character into both sculpture and exhibit.

At times, the production draws upon the language of durational performance, holding certain images beyond the point of comfort and making the audience sit with its unease. For half an hour before the performance, Taub sits in the gallery’s street-facing window. Wearing a kippah and traditional Jewish garb, he simply watches and waits. In Collingwood, at a time when visible Jewish presence in public space has become newly charged, the image is neither neutral nor decorative. The shomer begins his vigil before we have even entered the theatre.

Taub holds our attention from the moment he enters the performance space as the shomer and introduces us to the gilgul. He creates each character through a complete physical transformation, altering his posture, gait, facial expression and centre of gravity. It may be easy enough to imagine an actor becoming a donkey or a doctor; for a full-sized adult to become a leech is considerably more astonishing. Taub’s body becomes an enactment of gilgul itself: repeatedly inhabited, transformed and relinquished. In the process, he appears to inhabit not only different bodies but their distinct physical worlds—a kitchen, a jungle, a studio, a farm, a jar or a sitting room.

The transitions are among the performance’s most accomplished moments. Taub seems briefly emptied of one identity before assembling the next. A stooped shoulder, a grasping hand or an imperious stance suddenly announces the arrival of a new character. He differentiates the incarnations through striking changes in cadence, accent, volume and vocal register, moving between the booming confidence of pride, the furtive rhythms of greed and the quieter, burdened voice of the shomer. The recurring refrain—“Gilgul, Gilgul, Gilgul Ha’neshamot. The circle of souls; the circle of souls”—sustains the production’s ritual rhythm and draws the audience back into its cycle.

The final movement transforms what appeared to be a moral fable about recurring human vice into a meditation on Jewish wandering. The restless soul and the homeless Jews begin to mirror one another: neither is permitted to settle securely in one body, one place or one history. Yet the parallel is morally uneasy. Does the production imply that Jewish homelessness is a punishment, like the soul’s successive incarnations? Or, on the contrary, does it show how a people repeatedly cast out can nevertheless preserve a continuous identity? That, too, is a question for our time.

The Goldstone Gallery is an unusual venue for a theatrical production. The space is so confined that the audience’s proximity to the actor becomes part of the experience. The bare gallery provides a temporary home for a story concerned with the near impossibility of finding one, while the close staging makes every breath, gesture and physical transformation visible. Levi and Taub use that intimacy to remarkable effect.

The Gilgul leaves us wondering who is permitted to stop wandering—and whether safety, rather than redemption, may be the more difficult form of rest to attain.