The much-feted Sam Grabiner’s second play – following last year’s Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears – is a dark, dark comedy about a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional British Jewish family.
It is an anarchic meditation on the British Jewish psyche, that is really very fearless about ‘going there’ with certain political issues. It is about the British tradition of having a massive ding dong on Christmas Day. And it’s a comedy about living in London.
As the play begins, a bewildered Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) has arrived at the chaotic office conversion inhabited by his children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley), plus 10 other housemates who’ve mostly vacated the place because today is Christmas Day.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Elliot exclaims in horror at the room’s most noticable feature: some sort of industrial heater, suspended from the ceiling in spectacularly unwise fashion, that periodically roars into life very loudly.
It’s a dinner-party play, kind of: food is the nominal main event (a Chinese takeaway, in imitation of New York Jewish tradition), and as is the way with the genre, secrets are unveiled, revelations are revealed, etcetera.
James Macdonald’s production feels genre-cliche free, though, in part because the ‘family’ is so shambolic that food simply feels like another thing for them to argue about. Joining dithering Noah and pathologically intense Tamara is Noah’s sweet non-Jewish girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and Tamara’s slick ex Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who is back from a stint in Tel Aviv. Plus there’s Wren (Jamie Ankrah), a random housemate not invited to the meal, who simply appears to be too on drugs to have successfully gone away for the hols.
It’s not purely a play about the British Jewish experience, but it is a lot about it. There are different strands to this. Much of it is about the allure of other places in lieu of a sexier domestic identity. Elliot is fixated on New York: he has a New York Jewish partner and is even seeing her New York Jewish shrink by Zoom. He is constantly extolling the metropolis’s virtues to the unflappably polite Maud. For Aaron it’s Tel Aviv: he talks about its beaches and skies with a smug, gap yuh superiority. Tamara loses herself not in a place, but in fringey, apocryphal bits of ancient spirituality. What actually is British Jewishness, is the question it begs, and in terms of a coherent cultural identity it deliberately doesn’t have a snappy answer.
It’s not purely a play about the British Jewish experience, but it is a lot about it
The bits that will garner the most attention concern the group’s disharmony over Israel and its actions in Gaza. The writing is deft: it feels like the characters are trying to avoid the subject, and when it does come up the response is fiery and sudden and uncontrollable. I don’t think quoting the characters is helpful here, but let’s just say there’s a spectrum of views, with Tamara on the liberal, Israel-is-a-genocidal-state side, Aaron and Elliot taking a hard and often unpleasant opposite, and Noah characteristically dithering off to the side - albeit more because he’s consumed by a broader existential angst that distracts him from real world issues.
It’s not a didactic play that purely centres on the British Jewish community’s view of Israel. But certainly that’s one major faultline in a drama about how hopelessly fractured British Jewish identity can be, defined not just by ‘British’ and ‘Jewish’ but a thousand subidentities within.
Is this a good or fair representation of the average British Jewish family? That’s not for me to say, but certainly it feels like a compelling vehicle to explore generational divides and fractures.
Ultimately, beneath the strangeness of roaring heaters and fox corpses being dumped on the table, microdosing, mad housemates and political and spiritual arguments, it does all kind of build up to and hinge on a quite soapy climax that feels – more than anything – like a trad device to move the story along. The texture of Grabiner’s play is fascinating but he ends up shoving it along to an EastEnders-style finale that feels a bit crude.
Conversely, while stage legend Macdonald is undoubtedly yer man for ‘creeping strangeness’ - him and his creative team are in their element animating the odd, groaning building - it sometimes feels like his arty sensibilities are boxing in a show that should play out as a dark but broader comedy.
Still, his touch certainly helps amp up the otherness in Grabiner’s writing and he’s assembled a superb cast. Lindsay, Blenkin and Powley are particularly great as the father and kids at the heart of Christmas Day - their combination of ease with and disdain for each other is livewire, arcing between amusing (an over competitive quiz) to horrifying (certain opinions on Palestinians) in microseconds. Clearly it is likely to speak to a British Jewish audience most directly. But its depiction of a Christmas Day lunch spinning horribly out of control is – with intentional irony – a universally British concept.
