In the Net
Jermyn Street Theatre | ★★✩✩✩

Misha Levkov’s debut play is a cat’s cradle of crises. Set in North London in 2025, the plot enmeshes such hot-button issues as global warming and illegal migration and strings them together with an eruv, the man-made border within which the rules of Shabbat need not apply.

In the wake of her mother’s death Laura (Carlie Diamond in her professional debut) is in an expansive mood. Using her grief as a force for good she intends to create a space where fellow residents can feel safe, gather and eat — a refuge, if you will, for those oppressed by drought and fear of their increasingly feral society.

Yet despite the can-do attitude Laura never quite manages to explain the merits of her eruv to those she hopes to rope into her enterprise. These are chiefly half-sister Anna (Anya Murphy) and Syrian refugee Hala (Suzanne Ahmet), who live with the sisters and their father Harry (Hywel Simons).

But, crucially, the local planning committee must also be persuaded. To Laura’s frustration they refuse permission for the eruv amid protests that they tend to attract frumers and put up house prices.

Carlie Diamond In the Net WoLab Jermyn Street Theatre Photography by Steve Gregson9

Carlie Diamond (Steve Gregson)

Vicky Moran’s production is well performed but has difficulty in generating a place that suggests London in the near future. Ingrid Hu’s set — a formation of wooden frames across which frayed webbing lends a sense of general decay — feels more apocalyptic farmstead than, say, Fulham.

Also unconvincing is the eruv itself, which in Laura’s free-form interpretation is a spider’s web of criss-crossing string through which one could barely gather, let alone do a spot of Shabbat pram-pushing.

The evening climaxes with a chase as an immigration officer (Tony Bell) closes in on Hala, who by now has added her own Muslim contribution to Laura’s net.

Amid all this, the objective of turning a parched urban dystopia into a kind of utopia is rather lost and the evening morphs into a cacophony of clashing and ill-defined themes.

The idea of an eruv protecting the vulnerable is an interesting one. But you need believable characters who live in a convincing period and place to turn it into an evening of theatre.