What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Marylebone Theatre | ★★★★✩

There is a nagging context to this thrillingly combative, quintessentially Jewish play that cannot, or shouldn’t, be ignored. It is that the board of an unnamed major London theatre turned it down even after the venue’s artistic director gave it the green light. Why? Reportedly they feared protest about a work that explores Jewish attitudes to the war on Hamas in Gaza; recognises that the conflict was triggered by the massacre on October 7 but also agonises over the resulting thousands killed in the Palestinian territory.

Perhaps the decision is less craven than it appears and the board are simply unable to grasp that a play that does all this while at the same time tackling the inherited trauma of the Holocaust, is also a really smart and funny comedy.

More than one Jewish playwright in this country has said that British theatre often simply fails to understand the Jewish way of forging humour from the most horrifying of circumstances. The result is that these dramatists have felt they must be less Jewish if they are to get their plays performed on British stages.

But Nathan Englander’s play is as Jewish as they come. With the help of director Patrick Marber the author’s own short story of 2011 has been repurposed to reflect Jewish anxieties since October 7 and also the fissure between many Israeli and diaspora Jews.

The play is set in the big, comfortable Florida home of progressive secular Jews Phil and Debbie (Joshua Malina and Caroline Catz) who are hosting a strangely hurried visit from Debbie’s old best friend Shoshana (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) who is accompanied by her husband.

Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Gabriel Howell and Caroline Catz on stage at the Marylebone Theatre Photo: Mark Senior

Shoshana has not been in contact with Debbie for 20 years. In that time she became more religious ending up in a Chassidic marriage with Yerucham (Simon Yadoo) while Debbie became liberal though, in her view no less Jewish, ending up with the proudly sceptical Phil.

Imagine a typically combative Jewish debate about such knotty subjects as Israel; the current conflict (“don’t mention the war,” Debbie warns her husband) and what, if any, responsibility Jews have to perpetuate Judaism.

Here that heat is supercharged by two Jewish couples whose perspectives on these subjects could not be more contrasting. Being American and Israeli, no opinion goes unsaid. Concord between the couples sometimes emerges like magic out of the conflict while loyalty between the husbands and wives is often breached.

Among the many fuses that ignite this keg is the visitors’ view that Jewish families such as their host are responsible for a new Holocaust of Jews by only having the one child – in Phil and Debbie’s case twentysomething eco-warrior Trevor, terrifically played by Gabriel Howell, who manages to be both passionate and indolent at the same time. Debbie and Phil should be more like Shoshana and Yerucham and their eight children. Then there is the fuse of drink – lots of vodka – and getting high on Trevor’s marijuana. Shoshana has been known to keep a stash under her blonde, Marilyn Monroe-like sheitel, which Phil would love to touch.

Be patient. If the first act seems a shouty vehicle populated by ciphers created to convey an array of arguments, by the end these people are fully known not least thanks to some pitch-perfect acting.

I suspect that among Jews in the audience who are aligned more towards the progressive Phil and Debbie end of the spectrum there will be those who balk at their use of “genocide” as a descriptor of the massive death toll in Gaza. But who knew that Englander’s sublime short story could be a play that explores the Jewish condition post October 7? Other than Marber that is.