Oliver Walzer has a lot on his mind. His mother's love is smothering him, his father Joel is nagging about working on his market stall and he's a couple of points down in a crucial table tennis match refereed by someone who wants him to lose.
In Simon Bent's new adaptation of Howard Jacobson's 1999 Manchester-set novel The Mighty Walzer, which opens at the city's Royal Exchange Theatre next week, all this happens simultaneously. Walzer is standing centre stage, batting away ping pong balls and his parents' pleas while at the same time protesting at another dodgy "Fault!" declared by Finkel the ref. It's a fiendishly complex scene for director Jonathan Humphries to rehearse.
"Deuce!" calls Finkel. "Never," protests Oliver. "Are you talking to Joel?" asks actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, briefly dropping out of character. She plays Oliver's mother Sadie. "I think I'm talking to Finkel," says Elliot Levey who plays Oliver. "Right," says Oberman. "Let's do it again'" says Humphries, and they're off again. Soon all becomes clear.
"There are different realities taking place at the same time," explains Oberman later during a much-needed break from rehearsals. So that scene - in fact, pretty much the whole play - takes place inside Oliver's adult head.
"But it's not quite a memory play," adds Levey. "It's like a mid-life-crisis dressed up as a coming-of-age story," he says. Which is why, to play the teenage Walzer, Levey wont be shaving off his beard.
Set largely in Manchester's Cheetham Hill in the 1950s, Jacobson's book is autobiographical in the sense that it rises from the community in which the author grew up, and that Jacobson is (or was) a mean table tennis player. The book, which won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for best comic novel, generated a wide and loyal following despite the chewy Yiddishisms scattered throughout the prose.
The story centres on Oliver who is the product of opposites. His mother Sadie is brimful of fears and inhibitions, while his father Joel – a bus driver and philanderer – overflows with baseless grandiosity.
Then, one day, it turns out that somewhere in Oliver's second-generation Cossack-fearing DNA there lurks a talent for table tennis.
"On Twitter, very cool young, urban people are saying 'I love that book,'" Oberman has discovered. For many it remains the one of – if not the – favourite novel of the Booker-winning author's canon.
Adapting it for the stage had ping pong-related challenges.
"We've had this brilliant bloke from the Stockport Ping Pong Association," says Levey. "The other day we had a one-on-one and we did serves, about 500 serves."
Yet Levey never actually hits a ball. The sound of the game is enough to suggest a rally.
"And anyway, without a ball you can freeze the action and do things in slo-mo," says Humphries. It was his idea to turn the book into a play.
"I read the book and instantly thought there was something about misfits finding their group [in Oliver's case, other table tennis-loving Jewish misfits such as Aishky and Twink] that I found very moving. So I spoke to [Royal Exchange Artistic Director] Sarah Frankom who read it, got back to me and said 'This is great.'"
Jacobson's reputation for being the British Philip Roth – he prefers the Jewish Jane Austen – almost stymied the idea. "Sarah can't stand Roth," says Humphries. "But she found that Howard is a different, much warmer beast. There isn't the cruelty."
So a cast of some of the country's top acting talent , as the grandiose Joel might put it, has been gathered.
As well as former EastEnder Oberman's Sadie and Levey's Oliver, there is Ilan Goodman as Aishky, Jonathan Tafler as Joel and Ann Marcuson who plays Oliver's twin Aunts Dolly and Dora.
"As Jews we have - and Howard definitely has - that voice in the head that says 'This is too Jewish,' says Elliot.
"But what's terrific is that Simon Bent and [director] Johnny have collectively brought their non-Jewish sensibility to it. So you can trust that we're not too Jewish, and the stuff that we think is mundane and prosaic is actually exciting."
"I've just finished filming Friday Night Dinner which has been wonderful," says Oberman, who plays Auntie Val in the comedy series. "But here in a room full of Jewish actors there's a kind of shorthand you can tap into immediately. Everyone can just be themselves. It frees us up. And you get all these stories starting 'My grandfather was in the shmutte trade'." Oberman's own stories include a grandmother who "stayed around until she was 99 and spoke Russian and Yiddish." Clearly she comes from stock that is very similar to the Walzer family's antecedents.
"The one thing she knew how to say in English was, 'Look out for the Cossacks,'" says Oberman. It's that state of being on constant alert for catastrophe that informs Oberman's Sadie.
"She's a bit different from the Sadie in the book," says Oberman. "On stage Sadie is cautious, fearful, don't think too highly of yourself and expect the worst. But she is the backbone of the family. In the book you get the the explosive Joel and Sadie is talked about as being blushing and shy. But I don't think she is."
For Levey, the way to understanding his teenage character is through the mind of the adult version. "We sense melancholy and a man in search of who he is. He conjures up his past and summons his friends and family having spent his life running away from them and his northern Jewish lower middle class roots."
A couple of weeks ago, Jacobson was present at the first day of rehearsal. He apparently did more watching than talking.
"We did a read-through and he just stood there listening like some Zen guru," chuckles Oberman.
"He kept glancing over to the ping pong table in the room and you could just feel that the game was in his DNA."
"Receiving his blessing felt as close as this secular Jew has ever got to the burning bush," adds Levey.
