CHOSEN PEOPLE, CHOSEN LIVES
The saying goes “two Jews, three opinions”, though some say that’s an underestimate. Here are five people and innumerable opinions: two couples, plus a teenage son pouring scorn on both. The flashpoints are culture, religion, rules of modesty and marriage, parenting, politics, and of course Israel’s very existence and current self-defence.
Hot stuff, veering skilfully between serious pain and a sharptoothed hilarity reminiscent of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. Given the moment and the topics it is not surprising that Co-writer and director Patrick Marber found a big West End theatre nervous of it . But Marylebone does well to lay it out with panache and sincerity, because we need it. I can only write as a gentile, buy such plays (like Joshua Harman’s Bad Jews) are a window into the complexities of owning that remarkable heritage, and navigating the conflicts and gradations within it. The dense, talkative, witty, thoughtful play crams plenty into two hours, gets verbally and briefly physically violent and grows to an unexpectedly moving end. If it does nothing else, it will stop anyone ever saying “they’re all the same, Jews..”
. Phil, a lawyer, and Debbie are affluent sophisticates in Florida: to the disgust of Joshua MAlina’s Phil, wandering around in pink beach bermudas, Debbie has laid out kosher snacks for a visit from her former college friend, who has shed modernity to become ultra-Orthodox and lead a Hasidic lifestyle in Israel with her black-hatted traditional husband. They’ve changed their names to Shoshana and Yerucham, and observe the prescribed married-woman’s wig, a thing of such hellish brightness and curl that it fascinates Phil and leads to a strangely creepy moment once they start smoking pot in the second half.
The Israelis are over to visit his father, a holocaust survivor in a palm beach retirement home where – we unnervingly learn – he sees on another old man’s arm a tattoo number which is three digits lower than his, but does not form a sentimental bond as Yerucham hopes but grunts “Just means he got in the queue ahead of me”. Yes, the Holocaust haunts the piece, as well it might: Debbie is tearfully obsessed by any mention of it, and certain that all Jews everywhere should be permanently afraid that “they” will be back. Her son Trevor refers irritably to the horror as her “happy place”, and Yerucham is well up to making staggeringly tasteless puns about it, musing that it may have happened because Jews got too far from God prayer. The Floridians gasp.
All the best comedies have flashpoint differences between couples: not hard to guess how many there are here. Phil is smugly against what he sees as performative and dangerous Zionism; to him the future is America. Debbie, neatly drawn by Caroline Catz, slightly envies her friend;s emotionally wholehearted conversion-back to the music, rhythms and tribal rules of her friend’s life in Israel (Dorothea Myer-Bennett plays her at first as witty and confident, praising Israel’s freedoms as a democratic beacon in th middle east: Simon Yadoo as Yerucham has a pompous patriarchal strength which riles Phil no end, especially when they get to the sexual insults. Good lines zing between them all, many so sharp that only on a stage would they not get a visit from the hate-police.
Its based on Nathan Englander’s short novel, woth sharp collaboration by Marber and updating to acknowledge the current terrible conflict. And the way the West now is: when the book was published there was a sense that outside extremists or dumb bigots, real antisemitism was quite rare in the civilized west, or confined to acknowledged fools and bigots. Given the London streets lately, not much like that now. So it is all great fuel for both conflict and comedy: conflict because argument is at the heart of Jewish thought – Talmudic, indeed – and comedy because, come on, Jewishness is brilliant at it: clever, ironic, self-deprecating or hitting down hard universal human truths. And hard human bigotries: quite lightly the Hasidic couple admit they don’t think you’re a proper Jew at all unless you live in Israel. But they have a private grief, which slowly emerges, and brings out the shock of ultra-orthodoxy: they “sat shiva” for a week and declared the death of a daughter who dared fall in love outside Judaism.
For all the pain it’s a bracingly funny, moving and well-contructed play: the first half ends in a bravura rant by Gabriel Howell’s brilliantly teenage Trevor (who rejects both parental capitalism and the visitors’ orthodoxy with all the scorn of a “pastafarian” environmentalist). The second concludes with an uncomfortable but suddenly moving truth-exercise, one apparently not unfamiliar in some Jewish childhoods since the Holocaust: who would have risked death to hide Anne? Who would save me? After a surprising move from Phil softens the rocky terrain of the evening, Yaweh himself gets a line, a startling one.
I’d go again,to think further about many things they discuss.
Marylebonetheatre.com. To 23 nov
rating 4.
theatreCat 