The Rubenstein Kiss review: McCarthy-era drama is elegant but at times laborious

If audience members don’t already know the fate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, they will after the first scene of James Phillips’s 2005 drama.

Or, rather, they’ll learn what happened to Jakob and Esther Rubenstein, the Rosenbergs’ lightly fictionalised counterparts. (Why not just have the real people? It’s not clear). In 1953, when McCarthy-era America saw red peril everywhere, the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

Phillips’s detailed and at times laborious drama doesn’t come to any startling new conclusions about the pair’s culpability or not, but instead rather hedges its bets as it wends its meticulous way through elegant, occasionally overwritten scenes. It’s the kind of piece in which, at moments of high tension, every character has an apposite anecdote to share.

Interweaving the 1942-1953 storyline about Jakob (Henry Profitt) and Esther (Ruby Bentall) is a second one set in 1975, featuring a history teacher and a lawyer who bond over a shared fascination with the Rubenstein case. Joe Harmston’s sinuous traverse staging binds the two strands ever more closely together, as the passionate commitment of the Rubensteins to their ideals and their marriage continues to blaze.

Until April 13 (020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk)