What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank - Marylebone Theatre, London

Almost 15 years ago, I read a short story by Nathan Englander in the New Yorker. It was called What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The story is told in the first person and the narrator is a non-observant American Jew. The story is set in the spacious Florida house of the narrator and his wife, Debbie, also non-observant, thanks to the fact that the narrator, as he puts it, "turned her secular". The story concerns a visit by Debbie's long-lost best friend from high school, who, with her husband, is back in America to visit relatives, as the relatives have become too old to make trips to Israel, where the visiting couple live. 

The high school Debbie and her friend attended is described in the story as a "yeshiva high school".  The visiting best friend was called Lauren when she and Debbie were both schoolgirls. However, Lauren married a man called Mark and the two of them moved to Jerusalem and became truly Orthodox. They changed their names, Lauren becoming Shoshanna and Mark becoming Yerucham. The narrator does not like their Orthodoxy. They themselves appear to be caught between envy of the material comforts of the narrator's life and pride about their own country and decisions. 

A great deal of alcohol is consumed; some "pot", as it is called in the story, is smoked; the Holocaust is discussed - Debbie is very troubled by it, while Yerucham argues that the important thing about the Holocaust is to react by becoming a true adherent of Judaism. By adopting the way-of-life of the people who Nazis wanted to destroy, by being very visible, those who wished Jews were annihilated will be forced, he argues, to see that they are still here and still Jewish. The 16-year-old son of Debbie and the narrator shambles out of bed in the middle of all this and asks to borrow the car and then disappears, leaving a fairly poor impression of himself. Finally, a truth game is played, in which each character tries to imagine the other characters are not Jewish and then decide if they would trust them to shelter them if they were to find themselves in Anne Frank's situation. The story ends as one character appears to realise they do not trust another character as much as they ought. 

A play has now been made of the short story, a collaboration between the original author, Nathan Englander, and Patrick Marber. The action has been updated to now. Reportedly one large theatre in London pulled out of staging the play for fear of repercussions from pro-Palestine protestors. The Marylebone Theatre stepped into the breach. For me it was a revelation to find such a lovely little theatre. 

There was much that was good about the production I saw. The stage set was minimal but effective. The acting was energetic and there was not one moment of boredom in the whole performance. However, the changes to the plot made in transition from page to stage and from 2011 to 2025 were troubling. 

Firstly, in the theatrical adaptation, Yerucham goes further in his comments about the Holocaust than he does in the short story, arguing that the Holocaust was the fault of Jews who were insufficiently devout, that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves as a kind of punishment. Secondly, it emerges that Shoshanna has engineered the reunion because she is hoping to get support from the liberal Americans in persuading Yerucham to water down his principles so that she can keep in touch with one of their daughters who has entirely abandoned their Hasidic way of life and consequently been ostracised. And, thanks to the negotiating skills of our friend the liberal narrator, (Debbie's husband), the dinosaur Yerucham is led to agree to his wife's wish. 

Thirdly, the teenage son has been transformed into a recurring presence with an extremely forceful personality. He declares himself a pastafarian. He is given a passionately angry speech about climate change, in which he suggests that all the adults around him are beyond redemption as the world he will inherit has been utterly ruined by them. It isn't entirely clear that the audience isn't being invited to agree with this angry young man. Is he a joke and the performance of the actor in this production is simply too heartfelt to get that across - or is he genuinely meant to be the play's true hero?

Lastly, and most vitally, when Debbie starts to attack her Israeli friends, claiming that Israel is the source of all the problems Jews face in the world and using, unquestioningly and unchallenged, Hamas's casualty figures for the current war, she states that the most urgent - and ever-increasing - danger facing Jews in America is the danger of being attacked by white Nazis. This is such a cop-out on the part of Englander and Marber. The greatest danger Jews face everywhere in the world at present is the anti-semitism of Islamists, not the aggression of white Nazis. Yerucham is given a very few lines to try to remind these Americans he is visiting about the events of 7th October, but he is almost entirely drowned out and the truth of the atrocities committed that day is not given any kind of decent airing. Debbie implies that the appalling things done to innocent people, all too many of them naive supporters of the very people who took such delight in spilling their blood, is only what they had coming to them.

In short, the actors were all brilliant and the staging was excellent. My problem - and it is a huge one - is that at the centre of the newly wrought version of the story/play is complete cowardice. Marber and Englander refuse to admit it, but there is one dangerously aggressive bunch of people who are bent on destroying all Jews - and that bunch of people is not disgruntled rightwing white Americans.

The Merchant of Venice 1936, Theatre Royal Bath

 A new production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is always an interesting prospect, as the play is so puzzling. It contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful speeches, including probably the most famous discussion of mercy in the English language, but it tells the story of a man's desire to use the law to take revenge on another man, almost certainly killing him, and of the punishment that is meted out to that man for desiring to do such a thing. The fact that the man in question, Shylock, is Jewish only adds to the difficulties, as the play appears on the face of it to be anti-semitic, even though in Shylock's famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed" speech in Act 3, Shakespeare writes with what seems to be complete empathy for the plight of Jews subjected to anti-Semitism.

Perhaps because it is so difficult, the opportunities to see the play are fairly rare. But in 2023 an actress called Tracy Ann Oberman decided to create her own production, in which she would play Shylock, setting the action against the backdrop of the rise of Oswald Mosley and his followers. Having read too much PG Wodehouse as a child I have always equated Mosley with Sir Roderick Spode and consequently underestimated his dangerous influence. Oberman's grandmother was living in the East End of London at the time of Mosley's activities and took part in the Battle of Cable Street, something I knew nothing about before going to this performance. It was an event that seems to have demonstrated that Mosley was not the idiotic figure of fun I'd assumed, and learning of its existence has made me wonder about whether Wodehouse did everyone a disservice by creating Spode, using absurdity to minimise what was a real danger.  

Having been performed to great acclaim in London, the production is now touring Britain and so when it came to Bath while I was staying in Bristol I took the opportunity to go along (this is beginning to sound faintly like the opening to a visit to Julian and Sandy as spoken by Kenneth Horne). The performance I went to was a sell-out and in front of me were over 100 school children, almost overcome with excitement at being in a theatre.

The performance began in what I presume was Hebrew as some kind of Jewish ritual was presented, with Oberman at its centre. Once that was over we galloped into the play itself. A small cast doubled up playing a variety of parts and they were excellent in all of them. The whole thing is full of gusto and energy and Obermann as Shylock is superb. The fact that the character is played as a woman seemed to me to work very well - somehow a woman's suffering at the hands of bullies struck me as something one could feel more sympathy for than a man's, possibly because a man, possibly unfairly, is expected to fight rather than cry. Oberman's performance persuaded me that the arrogance and scorn Shylock is subjected to is more than enough to goad her into wishing to make the leader of her enemies suffer in his turn.

In what to me at first seemed a very clever twist but I later realised was an inevitable result of transforming Shylock into the play's hero, Portia, who I had always thought of as a heroine, is here presented as a really nasty creature, taking delight in grinding a Jew into the dust. While this was a revelation for me, given the over-reach of many in the modern legal profession, i didnt mind at all having a sense of hostility for a lawyer whipped up in my heart.

At the end, Oberman stepped forward and told of her grandmother's experiences in the Battle of Cable Street and then, together with the whole cast, exhorted the audience to show solidarity with their contemporary Jewish neighbours, while raising her fist over and over, in a gesture that, were Elon Musk to have made it, might have been mistaken for a Nazi salute. This seemed a faint sacrilege but I think Shakespeare survived it.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance. Despite many of the schoolchildren complaining as they left about how long the thing had gone on, the play has actually been admirably streamlined (although purists might argue that cutting out bits of Shakespeare can never be admirable). But there is one glaring flaw in the production - tragically, it is already out of date. The enemy faced by people of Jewish origin is no longer the Mosley mob they encountered in Cable Street. Oberman knows this all too well as since October 7, 2023 she has had to be guarded against attack from pro-Palestinians. 

It would have taken a lot of work but the truth is the production needs to be revamped. In place of Blackshirts, the characters opposing Shylock need to be dressed in those dreadful uniforms Hamas members love to parade in as they release hostages. It is not frustrated white men but Islamists who are bent on doing violence to Jews these days - and we all need to show solidarity with each other as they will be coming for us next.