Review: What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank

Across the country, friendships have fractured over what has, and hasn't been said post October 7 - while public discourse ranges from the viciously antisemitic to the silenced.

"Don't mention the war," warns wealthy secular American Debbie (Caroline Catz) before the arrival of her estranged schoolfriend, now an ultra-Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem.

Joshua Malina and Caroline Catz in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Image: Mark Senior)

Yet within seconds of Shoshana and Yerucham's arrival, waspish husband Phil (Joshua Malina) has "gone there," in a play that's wittily broken up into boxing-like rounds MC-ed by sardonic stoner son Trevor (Gabriel Howell).

Adapted from his own short story, Nathan Englander - with taut and punchy direction from Patrick Marber - delivers one of those zinging satires in which an alcohol-fuelled, privileged class trades blows over deeply sensitive topics. (God of Carnage, Bad Jews, Holy Sh!t)

These comedies of manners usually start with canapes and niceties, but on Anna Fleischle's status-conscious minimalist kitchen set, the tension opens at 7 and cranks up from there, as the quartet get into the weeds - and Trevor's weed stash - on religion, history, marriage, the Holocaust and dead Palestinians.

Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Simon Yadoo as Shoshana and Yerucham (Image: Mark Senior)

All the performances are terrific - Englander is even-handed in assigning flaws and flashes of humour and humanity in this messy Jewish identity crisis.

Dorothea Myer-Bennett's Shoshana is no doormat and the Israelis make a case for a loving marriage bounded by religious principles, while articulating the troubled history of the Jewish experience in the Middle East.

Religion has brought conflict though - a painful estrangement from a daughter who married out.

While the Floridans are furious that Israeli actions have taken the moral low ground and brought antisemitism to their door, Deborah's angst-ridden nostalgia for her Orthodox upbringing, and Trevor's raging climate anxiety and 'what's the point?' attitude hint at yearning for identity and meaning.

There's gallows humour, too in a running gag about an imagined Holocaust Disney theme park - where the ice-cream stall would be Anne Frank's Dairy and sell "six million flavours".

Caroline Catz and Dorothea Myer-Bennett (Image: Mark Senior)

While Deborah persuasively articulates why Jews who forget the Holocaust are "dead Jews", Simon Yaroo's bear-like Jerucham is the son of a survivor who prefers the future to the past.

Anne Frank becomes a touchstone of vulnerability and communality - as they play Deborah and Shoshana's childhood game ('no lying, no crying') in which they ask who would they risk their lives to hide them.

It's deeply personal and strangely purifying, and if Englander leaves us with no answers he has perhaps moved the needle on an urgent dialogue.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank runs until November 23 at Marylebone Theatre.