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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.
