'The Holy Rosenbergs' review — this pressure cooker of a drama is a sharp and timely revival

Read our review of Ryan Craig's play The Holy Rosenbergs, now in performances at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 2 May.

Summary

• Ryan Craig's play The Holy Rosenbergs is revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory
• The timely family saga in set in north London and reflects tensions in Gaza
• There are career-best performances from Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Tracy-Ann Oberman

“Do the right thing,” a doctor and synagogue grandee says by way of an exit line well into the second act of The Holy Rosenbergs. But It’s to the credit of Ryan Craig’s commendably dense play that characters can rarely agree as to what exactly that “thing” is.

Premiered in 2011 at the National Theatre, this pressure cooker of a domestic drama has returned – set as before in a Jewish household in Edgware, north London, but somewhat tweaked so as to reflect the ramped-up political landscape. The difference is a production from Lindsay Posner that cuts far more deeply than the text did first time round, coupled with a realisation that the central issues of the play occupy today’s headlines with a gathering ferocity reflected in the commitment of Posner’s first-rate cast.

The pivotal figure is Ruth (Dorothea Myer-Bennett, doing career-best work), a Jewish human rights lawyer newly returned to the UK from Geneva who is contributing to a UN report on IDF war crimes in Gaza. The year is 2009, since which time such acronyms as the ICC and ICJ have acquired a grievous familiarity.

Ruth is due to deliver the eulogy the next day at the funeral of her brother, Danny, whose very commitment to the IDF has cost him his life. A third sibling, Jonny (Nitai Levi), is a tearaway with a habit for getting embroiled in punch-ups: violence within the Rosenberg household clearly takes different forms.

Words, of course, can wound as well, and it’s been some time since I’ve been to a play where one remark or another made a rapt audience so audibly draw breath. A dutiful daughter up to a point, Ruth exists at odds with her fusspot of a mother, Lesley (Tracy-Ann Oberman, in superb form), and a down-on-his-luck father, David (a febrile Nicholas Woodeson), whose desperate need to prop up his catering business suggests an Ashkenazi Jewish variation on Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.

Miller’s influence is directly felt in the plotting: as in All My Sons, you feel a dead son in this play overwhelming the lives of those left behind, the deceased exerting control via language that forces a very real reckoning with the truth.

Craig is canny enough to allow comedy its due. A sweet exchange about Leonardo DiCaprio results in a film title of his that needs correcting, and Ruth attempts to curb her mother’s tendency to over-feed her guests: “He’s a rabbi, not a spaniel,” she says of Rabbi Simon (Alex Zur).

And just when we think everyone has had their say, the play adds fresh voices to the mix. Those come after the interval in the first instance from the medic (Dan Fredenburgh), a widower who isn’t best pleased at the optics of David’s firm catering the wedding of one of his four daughters. Ruth’s boss then makes a surprise appearance in the silken form of Sir Stephen Crossley (a coolly commanding Adrian Lukis), a legal hotshot who argues that Israel “act proportionately”. That’s not a point-of-view the mournful Lesley and David are keen to hear.

The play packs copious amounts of despair and difference in opinion into a taut two acts, and it’s hardly Craig’s fault if some of the rhetoric can’t help recall such recent hits as Giant and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. (The director of that last title, Patrick Marber, was in the press night audience alongside his new leading man in The Producers, Richard Kind.)

Ruth is referred to at one point as “ a lit fuse”, as befits a play whose terrain is more of an (often literal) landmine than ever. You watch enthralled at Craig’s skill in layering the debate, all the while lamenting the seeming eternal nature of the arguments here laid forth. “On we bloody well go,” says Sir Stephen before he, too, departs the action, and as the play both sorrowfully and skilfully informs us, indeed we do.

The Holy Rosenbergs is at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 2 May. Book The Holy Rosenbergs tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Holy Rosenbergs (Photos by Manuel Harlana)