'Christmas Day' review — it's the family gathering from hell in Sam Grabiner's intriguing, beautifully acted play

Read our review of Christmas Day, now in performances at the Almeida Theatre to 8 January 2026.

Summary

• Sam Grabiner's new play Christmas Day comes to the Almeida Theatre
• The story centres on a Jewish family brought together for a fraught festive meal
• The cast features Nigel Lindsay as Elliot and Bel Powley as his impassioned daughter
• James Macdonald directs a thought-provoking production

It’s a bleak midwinter indeed in the spooky-seeming industrial setting that is the location for Christmas Day, Sam Grabiner’s fascinating, beautifully acted play about a Jewish family brought together for the festive season gathering from hell.

An overhead heater clanks noisily away atop Miriam Buether's deliberately featureless set and may be cancerous; the local area is depleted except for an overabundance of foxes; and the Northern Line is heard making ominous rumblings – but isn’t the tube not supposed to be running on Christmas Day?

These issues pale next to the pile-up of rancour and revelation that attend the meal itself. Don’t expect turkey and trimmings: the fare at this Hendon table is takeaway Chinese – pork very likely included – as is often the Christmas Day repast of choice at such time-honoured Jewish locations as Manhattan’s Upper West Side (specifically named).

“Have you seen the news?” one or another of the assemblage keeps asking, though quite what they are referencing is not said. Indeed, it’s hugely unsettling to experience this play in the immediate wake of the terror attacks on the Jewish community in Australia, not least when the onstage conversation turns longingly to the white beaches of Tel Aviv. Horror, we're well aware, knows no specific habitation, and that fine director, James Macdonald, makes the pauses count alongside the enflamed passions.

First to show up is Elliot (the redoubtable Nigel Lindsay), who is surprised to discover his children sharing a home with 10 others, most of whom are away; a divorcé, he has a girlfriend spoken of but not seen. Jamie Ankrah drifts in and out of view playing a sequence of zombified outsiders but, for the rest, attention is directed towards the gradual build-up of tension, ideological and otherwise, at a dinner table from which no one emerges unscathed.

Talk inevitably turns to the Middle East, on which point emotions equally inevitably run high. The fiery Elliot has views on everything – Gaza, he says, is “fucking ours, all right?” – but so does his impassioned daughter, Tamara (Bel Powley, in bruising form), who looks despairingly at modern-day Jewry: “We are the bad guys now,” is her synoptic view, spoken not long after she has been sick in the sink. Tamara’s blistering précis of the current state of play in the Middle East actively stings. And once voices get raised, hers is the loudest, as befits someone whose quiz night skillset extends to knowing every name of the singers from Girls Aloud.

Elliot’s son Noah (the invaluable Samuel Blenkin) has a softer presence in keeping with his gentle-seeming gentile girlfriend, Maud (Callie Cooke), who at one point breaks into “In the Bleak Midwinter” as if to reaffirm the prevailing mood established at the start. Completing the line-up is Aaron (the ever-dynamic Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), Tamara’s ex, who is newly arrived back in the UK from Israel and delivers one of several narrative jolts as we approach the play’s shivery if also rather opaque conclusion, with pauses along the way to ponder a world where the Holocaust might not have happened.

A final scene played during previews has now been cut, so one wonders what note Grabiner exited on before. As it exists now, this first play since his Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears suggests itself as an English variant of sorts on Stephen Karam’s mysterious, Tony-winning The Humans, both plays linked by a potent awareness of dread as quite possibly the natural state of mankind.

“I want to clean you like a newborn child,” Maud tells the naked Noah near the finish, as if regression to some primal state of being were the only way to start anew. I’m not sure Grabiner has yet landed the knockout ending his consistently intriguing script requires, but I look forward to the further iterations of a play whose onward life looks set to continue well beyond the single day of its title.

Christmas Day is at the Almeida Theatre to 8 January 2026.

Photo credit: Christmas Day (Photos by Marc Brenner)