THIS IS NOT A LIGHT NIGHT OUT, BUT IT’S AN ENTERTAINING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING ONE PACKED WITH POLISHED PERFORMANCES

By Anthea Gerrie | Vie Magazine: Anthea Gerrie | Press Invite

You don’t have to be Jewish to get What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, but it helps – if only to understand the paranoia underlying every nervous laugh-line in the script of this bitter comedy. Because the answer is the subtext every member of the world’s most consistently-persecuted minority can relate to, however much some may seek to suppress the sentiment: “They’re out to get us again, and who will have our back when they come for us?”

The question was the crux of a game the writer Nathan Englander actually played with his sister growing up, and has resurrected in a play for times when the sense of existential threat has never seemed stronger to Jews living in the shadow of the Holocaust than today, in the wake of the unimaginable events of October 7 and all that atrocity perpetuated.

Englander had only just adapted his short story published in 2012 into a play about Jews’ sense of identity and insecurity when their worst nightmare came true with the invasion of Israel by murderous enemies hell-bent on extinguishing what was never the safe homeland intended. The play was plunged into a further year of rewrite to bring it bang up to date as the four protagonists hammer out their differences over Gaza, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and the Israeli response to the unwanted war they never started.

But there’s much more to the conversation between two former best friends meeting for the first time in 20 years and their husbands as they discuss the divergent paths their lives have taken and the impact on their marriages, parenting style and views of the future. Debbie, played by Caroline Catz, of Doc Martin fame, has become increasingly liberal and materialistic – the action is set in her $500,000 Florida kitchen – while the former Lauren (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) has become an orthodox wife to the husband she met while studying in Jerusalem, and stayed on with in Israel to raise a large family. Shoshana, as she now styles herself, having adopted a Hebrew name like her husband, embraces the restrictions this life imposes on her to dress modestly and keep her hair covered (although there is apparently no law against getting high), but has clearly found joy and meaning in her chosen path, while for all her own freedoms Debbie can never escape from that feeling of existential threat.

Although as Debbie’s husband Phil, Joshua Malina of West Wing and Big Bang Theory fame, is by far the biggest star on stage, he is a rather unconvincing wisecracker, bent mainly on needling Shoshana’s husband Yerucham, who believes the liberal couple and millions like them pose the greatest threat to Judaism by paying little attention as their children marry out of the religion. Not that Phil and Debbie’s son Trevor is married, but he represents a new, non-affiliated generation that despairs of his elders who are certainly not betters, having ruined the planet for his contemporaries. Gabriel Howell, recently seen on the small screen in Nightsleeper, brings a breath of fresh air to the production, introducing first his parents, then every scene, with a comic shrug of world-weariness. After fisticuffs finally break out, he entreats the adults to get up and play the last and most chilling scene from which the work takes its name, a truth game in which each pretends to be a teenage Anne Frank seeking refuge from the Nazis and asks the others in turn if they would risk their own life to save theirs by providing a hiding place.

This is not exactly a light night out, but it’s an entertaining, thought-provoking one packed with polished performances. It doesn’t take sides, just asks questions – and as every Jew knows, that always propagates another question, to which there never seems to be a definitive answer. Full marks to Patrick Marber, who has so successfully explored Jewish identity in directing Leopoldstadt and relationships in his own play Closer, for persisting with a collaborative work so controversial he claims a major West End playhouse turned it down before it landed for a limited run in the beautiful little Marylebone Theatre.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank runs until November 23.

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Photo Credit: Mark Senior

CREATIVES

Writer: Nathan Englander
Director: Patrick Marber
Designer: Anna Fleischle

CAST

Joshua Malina – Phil
Caroline Catz – Debbie
Dorothea Myer-Bennett – Shoshana
Simon Yahoo – Yerucham
Gabriel Howell – Trevor