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However nervous you are about a Christmas spent with your loved ones, it can’t be as bad as that endured by the North London Jewish family in Sam Grabiner’s fascinating but testing new play. Here, old domestic tensions are overshadowed by fear of rising antisemitism, a sense of cultural dislocation, and a clash between ardent Zionism and guilt over Gaza.
All these things are expressed stridently but obliquely in an absurdist comedy of sorts - an inchoate howl about the state of the world, and about the complexities of being a liberal British Jew. James Macdonald’s production has the feel of one of those European arthouse movies where collective familial and cultural guts are spilled over a dinner table – plus, in this case, those of a dead fox. I was gripped but I also wanted to scream at these characters to get out of their own heads and connect.
Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) is visiting his twentysomething children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley) in the horrible, semi-converted industrial building they share with ten others. A menacing heater the size of a bank safe hangs from a girder, flaring into life with the sound of a machine gun, while the Northern Line roars threateningly from below.
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Noah and his people-pleasing gentile girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) have put up a Christmas tree and fairylights. The jittery, combative Tamara resents these Christian/pagan intrusions. But then, she seems to resent everything, including Elliot, Noah, and her ex-boyfriend Jack (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who’s starry-eyed after a trip to Tel Aviv and has started using his more semitic middle name, Aaron.
Though emotionally fragile and furiously critical of Israel (“we are the bad guys now”), Tamara has invited Jack to join the family for their Chinese takeaway on Christmas Day. This, Jack points out, is a tradition for New York Jews not Londoners: “You’re not Larry David. We’re in Hendon.”
Discourses on religious lore vie with questions about whether pain can be the foundation of identity. Noah feels that the Jewish covenant with God has been eroded over generations, or replaced with “Woody Allen, Tottenham, anxiety”. In one of many chilling lines he claims: “I think I miss the pogroms.”
At one point Elliot embarks on a rant defending Israel and the territory it occupies, repeatedly screaming, “It’s ours!” He’s in a new relationship and in therapy, but we never learn what happened to Noah and Tamara’s mother, and a question hangs over whether his own mother escaped the Holocaust or not. Which leads Noah to wonder if the Holocaust ever really happened: or at least, to imagine a world where it didn’t.
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In a play about identity, Grabiner is willfully, irksomely elusive on details. We get no idea what any of the characters do for work and world events are mostly, vaguely referred to as “the news”. To add to the weirdness, Jamie Ankrah wanders periodically through the set as a disconcertingly spaced out flatmate (it’s he who brings in the dead fox) or a youth looking for drugs. Perversely, Grabiner will sometimes shine an illuminating light – on the sex lives of Jack and Tamara or Elliot and his girlfriend, on the childhood bond between Jack and Noah, on Maud’s upbringing with an abusive Quaker mother – then snap it off again.
Challenging and frustrating though the play is, I was hooked throughout. It’s bold of Grabiner to tackle the ramifications of rising antisemitism and the war in Gaza, albeit in a raw and elliptical form. Bold too of the Almeida to schedule it during the season of family shows and panto.
Christmas Day is often viciously funny, thanks in large part to the delivery of the always-excellent Lindsay and of Cooke, who brings exquisite comic timing as well as late pathos to Maud. Powley and Blenkin imbue their awkward, misfit characters with a strange fascination. This confirms the strong voice and experimental promise shown in Grabiner’s first play Boys on the Verge of Tears, staged at Soho Theatre last year, but I’m not sure his talent is fully focused just yet.
To Jan 8, almeida.co.uk.
