A death in the family is always a reckoning. In this absorbing revival of Ryan Craig’s play from 2011, it is also an unravelling, one in which morality and geopolitics play out on a highly patterned carpet in a Jewish suburban dining room.
It’s 2009 and the Rosenbergs have lost their eldest son, who left north London to fight for Israel. His death is a further blow to the family and its venerable catering company (dad “reckons some ancient relative catered the Last Supper”). There was the suspected food poisoning, while daughter Ruth (a rebarbative Dorothea Myer-Bennett, excellent) is a lawyer investigating human rights abuses in the war on Gaza – an inquiry which only heightens tensions within the community.
