What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank review – charged chat explores Jewish identity

David Jays
·2-min read
<span>Tautly dramatic … (l to r) Dorothea Myer-Bennet, Caroline Catz, Joshua Malina, Gabriel Howell and Simon Yadoo in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.</span><span>Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian</span>
Tautly dramatic … (l to r) Dorothea Myer-Bennet, Caroline Catz, Joshua Malina, Gabriel Howell and Simon Yadoo in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

Nathan Englander’s short story, first published in the New Yorker in 2011, tracks four Jews in a room, bitching. The room is Debbie and Phil’s swank Florida kitchen; the other Jews are Debbie’s former schoolfriend and her husband, visiting from Israel. Debbie’s life is now secular, while Lauren became Shoshana and lives ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem with husband Mark-turned-Yerucham. The reunion swiftly turns sour.

With its nebbish bravura, Englander’s skittish story prodded the unspeakable during the Obama years. We’re in a different place now: director Patrick Marber urged Englander to write this version to reflect the crisis of Jewish identity since 7 October.

The former friends assess each other: Shoshana in her married woman’s wig, a resplendent blond torrent, versus svelte Deb (“In our part of Jerusalem, you’d get stoned”). The Israelis browse Instagram and smoke weed. Everyone gets pissed and then high.

Englander thoughtfully develops his scenario, probing the characters’ backstories, giving them a whole new set of stuff to kvetch about. After the first swipe at Israel (“we’re doing this already?”) comes religious versus cultural identity, conflicting ideas of home, the right way to be Jewish. Debbie (Caroline Catz)’s gnawing preoccupation with the Holocaust and Yerucham (Simon Yadoo)’s fulminations on intermarriage get extra force, while the agonies of the past year inevitably erupt.

The story is already rich in dialogue (though, shorn of his narrator’s snark, Joshua Malina’s Phil loses focus to his fervent companions). Marber keeps the chat tautly dramatic, filling Anna Fleischle’s elegant skeleton of a kitchen with the antagonistic cross-currents of things best left unsaid. Standout among the strong performances is Dorothea Myer-Bennett’s Shoshana, playing the dialogue like a sardonic musical virtuoso. Gabriel Howell, wonderful as the hosts’ teenage son, makes a blearily unimpressed master of ceremonies.

And the title? That’s a revealingly nasty “game of ultimate truth” from the girls’ childhood. In Anne Frank’s position, who would shelter you? The story ends in heart-stopping mistrust – the play elaborates the game’s ceremonial atmosphere and adds an inward-looking gravity. Even so, a piece built on angst and zingers can’t quite hold this political moment with all its fury and despair.