THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Nathan Englander
Marylebone Theatre, 35 Park Road, London NW1 6XT, until November 25, 2024
I can’t help but wonder what the effect would be of showing What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander’s wickedly funny, moving play exploring Jewish identity in Israel, or to some of the other principal players currently involved in the conflict right now. What would say, people in Gaza or the West Bank think? Would they recognize themselves?
Englander is not trying to solve any global conflicts with this play; nor is Patrick Marber in directing it; nor is Josh Malina (of West Wing and Big Bang Theory fame) in helping to bring it from San Diego in 2019, where it started as a play inspired by a short story published in The New Yorker, to London in its current form with rewrites that incorporate the tumultuous and unspeakably horrific events of the last year.
But they do present an incredibly compelling meditation on contemporary Jewishness and the influence of The Holocaust, and in problematizing this search for identity, the play at least gestures to the common ground between all Jews and the shared sense of longing and unity in shared experience and heritage.
Also, again, wickedly funny.
The play takes us to Florida, and to affluent middle class couple Phil (Malina) and Debbie (Caroline Catz, ITV’s Doc Martin ), preparing to host a reunion with Debbie’s friend from high school Shoshana (Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Leopoldstadt) who has since made Aliyah, committed to Hasidic orthodoxy, got married to ultra orthodox Yerucham (Simon Yadoo)and made a family in Jerusalem. The tensions and touching moments that ensue are a pure delight. Malina’s Phil is constantly prodding away at Shoshana and Yerucham’s customs, resulting in some quick, acerbically stichomythic exchanges. And yet, where we expect there to be unbridgeable divides in understanding, there are surprising acknowledgments of common ground. Englander’s take is a challenging interrogation of the internal divisions that exist in the global Jewish community, but it always feels fast-paced and entertaining.
Performances are magnificent throughout, but slicing through all of the tension with wonderfully sardonic charisma is Gabriel Howell (of last year’s hit Netflix series, Bodies) as Phil and Debbie’s son, Trevor. He swaggers confidently through tradition and irreverently kicks through the fourth wall to anchor the production in moments of clarity through his young and yet cynical eyes. And yet he also deftly manages to make the moments between his character and his character’s parents ones of touching, if tinged with sarcasm, filial affection.
Marber cleverly moves us from a staged, awkward and tentative feeling atmosphere – aided cleverly by Anna Fleischle’s innovatively angular set design – to one of slapstick violence by the penultimate scene, and to moving pathos when the two couples play the game that gives its name to the play, by candle light. It reminded me of the longing I often felt as a kid growing up in a repressive Irish Catholic family for a domestic atmosphere in which problems were aired loudly and frequently and debated with enthusiasm and passion, plausibly coming together after an honest exchange of views to celebrate and embrace those differences of perspective. It is this quality that makes this play both entertaining and effective as commentary on the current state of the world.
