Theatre Review - What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
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| Simon Yadoo in What We Talk About… [Mark Senior] |
Nathan Englander’s play about Jewish identity began as a 2011 short story published in The New Yorker, before premiering at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019.
Shoshana (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Yerucham (Simon Yadoo) meet in the Florida home of Phil (Joshua Malina) and Debbie (Caroline Catz). Shoshana and Yerucham are Orthodox and live in Israel, while their hosts are secular. Shoshana and Debbie used to be old school friends.
The couples bicker about their beliefs and choices. They drink and get high together. Phil and Debbie’s son Trevor (Gabriel Howell) acts as a sort of MC, introducing each act and delivers a terrific speech about the climate catastrophe, while castigating the adults’ navel gazing.
In the second half of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the mood darkens with mention of October 7 (Englander spent the last year updating the text for this production).
The central premise remains the same: two friends, representing different political and religious views, reminisce and see if they can rekindle the affection they once felt. However, Englander brings it bang up to date and now their conversations reference Hamas’s hostage-taking, Benjamin Netanyahu’s response and the actions of Israel’s Defence Forces.
We queasily watch as the couples enact an old game the women had played as girls in which they imagine who would hide them if there was a second Holocaust.
Patrick Marber directs with his usual panache but the characters’ comic banter occasionally grates and it isn’t until the sharper second half, bringing together the play’s hard-hitting contemporary themes, that the drama really ignites.
To November 23 and thereafter January 20 - February 15