"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank". Marylebone Theatre

Patrick Marber seems to have turned to his Jewishness relatively late in his career, and now it’s pouring out in an anxiety-ridden flood. Leopoldstadt addressed the generational trauma of the Holocaust, and it was followed by Nachtland, a play about siblings arguing over a painting that might be by Hitler. This November he is directing Mel Brooks’s musical adaptation of The Producers (signature tune Springtime for Hitler), and now he brings us What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank at the Marylebone Theatre.

This isn’t the Jewishness of tsitsit and synagogue. It’s the kind that comes from inherited pain, guilt and survival, echoing from parent to child in the buffeting decades, and leavened, unlike the bread of affliction, by one of the finest comic minds of our generation.

But maybe the Jewishness has always been there. The first time I ever saw Marber on stage, in 1984, he was performing The Yiddish Rap ('Rap, shmap, the Yiddish Rap, call it a bagel, never a bap'). The Men From Del Monte, one of his earliest sketches, featured two wannabe terrorists who turned out to be a pair of hopeless nebbishes. His first play, Dealer’s Choice, may have been set around a poker table, but its real battleground was the guilty secrets between father and prodigal son. It’s only in the last few years that Marber has allowed his own heritage literally to take centre stage. And, with all due respect to Sir Tom Stoppard, this time he’s nailed it.

The scenario could not be simpler: in their luxury Florida home, secular Jewish couple Phil and Debbie meet up with visiting ultra-orthodox couple Shoshana and Yerucham. Snacks are served. Sparks fly. That’s it. Shmabigail’s Party.

WWTAWWTAAF began life as a short story by Nathan Englander in 2012. The question it addressed was: how would people react if there were a new wave of antisemitism, and Jews had to go into hiding like the Frank family in 1942? How could Englander have known that, barely twelve years later, that question would be considerably less academic? In adapting his story for the stage, he and Marber have brought it right up to date, so that the topics debated – family, faith, tradition – now have the dominant issue of our day, Israel v Palestine, foregrounded with all the bitter division of rival encampments. What lends the proceedings tragic piquancy is that these are Jews on either side of the debate, divided not by race or religion, but by their own perspectives. Where you stand on Israel/Gaza sunders not only countries, but communities, families, and even individuals.

Anna Fleischle’s design is clean and antiseptic, with heartless strip-lights illuminating the arguments below, like an operating theatre. Even the floor is edged in white light. It’s as if the setting is not really a luxury house in Florida, but a condo of the mind, where the interior dialogue with which Jews are wrestling can be externalised and examined. As if to point this out, Phil and Debbie’s son Trevor introduces each act, breaking the fourth wall like a psychiatrist showing us a recent, and particularly fascinating, case study.

If this all sounds a bit like an extended philosophical argument, it shouldn’t. Englander’s script is both heart-rending and hilarious. Ancient foibles and resentments bubble to the surface like farts in the bath, and the show isn’t afraid of probing for jokes in that most verboten of comic topics, the Holocaust. As the characters vie for dominance, they become a visual embodiment of the famous Jewish joke about the rowing crew (the other teams had eight men rowing and one man shouting; our problem is we had one man rowing and eight men shouting).

None of this would work without a simply sensational cast. And Joshua Malina, Caroline Catz, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Simon Yadoo and Gabriel Howell (as teenage son Trevor) play off each other with all the precision and mastery of the Amadeus Quartet. At the climax of the play, when each of them in turn takes on the role of Anne Frank herself, and asks the others if they would save her or let her die, it genuinely feels as though they might give a different answer every night. The actors are themselves Jewish, and their personal passion for what is being addressed in these two precious hours is unmistakeable. Whatever your perspective, they, Englander and Marber are saying, the way forward is to talk, shout and engage – not to ignore. I was reminded of a wonderful moment in Dominic Harari’s 2004 Spanish film Only Human, when a pair of lovers, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, suddenly fly into a furious debate and end with nothing but words:

A: Our land!

B: Since when?

A: Forever!

B: Who built Jerusalem?

A: The Jebusites.

B: Israel existed before Palestine.

A: And Canaan before Israel.

B: It’s settled then. We'll give it to the Canaanites.

A: They no longer exist.

B: So?

A: So what?

B: Exactly.

A: Exactly. 

The Gaza/Israel material has been retrofitted – and in truth, in an ideal scenario, the characters for that debate might be a little more cross-generational than the two couples we have here.

But the issue that gradually emerges as the real heart of this play has been there all along. It’s one which all but the most traditional and fundamentalist of Jewish communities would describe as a Schande (a shame). It’s how some ultra-orthodox Jewish families – including Shoshana and Yerucham – treat children who marry ‘out’.

The child who marries out is treated as dead. The family sits shiva, and cuts off all contact with the child. And I’ll go out on a limb here, and say, in my view, that’s not a good tradition for anyone. It kills the parents as much as it kills the child. It’s a tragedy that hovers like a dybbuk behind this play and behind that other great standard of Jewish entertainment, Fiddler on the Roof. And ultimately, it is what we really talk about when we talk, if only symbolically, about Anne Frank: our daughter: our beautiful, intelligent, warm-hearted, creative, disobedient, pheromone-fuelled daughter, who died.