three Jewish writers with form look at life-cycle milestones from unexpected and quirky angles
As a cultured and affluent-looking couple celebrating their golden wedding share leftover cake from the party over a crossword, you could be forgiven for assuming we were already tackling marriage. But when another woman interrupts this domestic scene, writer Amy Rosenthal’s wonderfully left-field take on ‘Birth’ unfolds. For Michael (Nigel Planer) is a retired and privileged obstetrician and the visitor claims he induced her birth early to get away on honeymoon, giving rise to a catalogue of oblique life issues. It is left to his tactful wife Lynda (Caroline Gruber) to pacify Dorothea Myer-Bennett’s nervy interloper - and possibly to finish the crossword… With cake and crossword standing as metaphors for the lives of the entitled specialist and his endlessly patient wife, maybe this opening short play of our cycle is as much about the appetites and travails of a long-term relationship as the beginning of life.
Alexis Zegerman’s exploration of ‘Marriage’ is equally unpredictable. You might think the edgy young couple at a restaurant are only just meeting, but actually they are a married couple repeatedly rewinding to an unpromising first date which didn’t bode well for the future. This surreal play and rewind is actually courtesy of a fellow diner with a disturbing smirk, Nigel Planer’s Godfrey, who seems to be eavesdropping on Eva (Abigail Weinstock) and Adrian (Sam Thorpe-Spinks). The clue is in the three names. Eva and Adrian are Godfrey’s ‘chosen people’, who have so far failed to ‘propagate the Jewish race…’ Presumably the restaurant is called Eden…?
Ryan Craig’s take on ‘Death’ is perhaps the most unexpected - and shocking - of the three, with the darkest humour. The father is again a medical specialist, this time a cancer surgeon (Adrian Schiller), with two edgy children, apparently adult in age at least, Leah (Abigail Weinstock) and Adam (Dan Wolff).
They have plenty to be uneasy about, as the children’s (unseen) mother appears to be settling her affairs rather ahead of the game. But the tale enters a different level of absurdity when Adam reveals that the funeral he is planning is actually for his beloved hamster ‘Golda Meir’, for whom he has constructed the tiniest of coffins, despite the apparent possibility that she is ‘Schrödinger’s hamster’ and her death is not certain.
The climax of this brief, sometimes barmy and always telling evening is the family’s hesitant chanting in Hebrew of Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer. The hamster has not lived in vain and the audience, whether Jewish or not, have laughed and applauded throughout.
Speaking personally, it was a significant joy that the Soho Theatre venue was formerly the tiny West End Great Synagogue where Steve I were married, so the journey through the lifecycle had great resonance and possibilities for me and did not disappoint.
But have Emanate Production’s founders Thorpe-Spinks & Dan Wolff, with Associate Producer Tanya Truman, and nimble director Kayla Feldman, succeeded more broadly? While I suspect the majority of the appreciative audience at press night were also Jewish, The Arc Trilogy, with its exploration of themes that affect us all, certainly communicates widely and, as Emanate’s founders intended, 'explores and celebrates ways of being Jewish at a time of rising antisemitism' .
By Judi Herman
Photos by Danny With A Camera
The Arc: A Trilogy of New Jewish Plays runs until Saturday 26 August. 7pm. From £24. Soho Theatre, London, W1D 3NE. sohotheatre.com