Filthy Business, by Ryan Craig, was inspired by memories of his family’s rubber trading business in north London’s Holloway Road, although he maintains that the three generations of a Jewish family, at odds with one another, are largely invented. The shop is brilliantly designed by Ashley Martin-Davis – plausibly mysterious, as such shops are.
Overseeing the family and the business is Yetta, who came to England as a refugee from eastern Europe, and as an old lady still rules with a rod of rubber. Sara Kestelman’s performance is a tour de force: funny, foul mouthed, indomitable. Vulnerability, she suggests, makes tyrants of us all. And if the play, at times, seems like poor man’s Arthur Miller, that is no slur. It is lively entertainment and Edward Hall directs with vigour.
