(seen at the first preview performance on 15th August 2023)
What happens when three top young Jewish writers get to grips with the fundamental facts of existence – birth, marriage and death? With each of them choosing one of these topics, it is an intellectually involving and often painfully funny 70 minutes of contemplation.
Amy Rosenthal kicks off with “Birth,” as traditional 70s and 80s party songs give way to Lynda (Caroline Gruber) and Michael (Nigel Planer) seated around the remains of their 50th Wedding Anniversary cake (marzipan, for the record, yum).
The doorbell rings, in walks Naomi carrying a plant and best wishes from the end of the Northern Line bedevilled by a rail replacement bus service. While she makes use of the loo, the couple...
To say more will spoil entirely this beautiful construct which relies on constant misdirection, a crossword clue you will have to solve for yourself. Luckily, Rosenthal’s writing is sharp as a mohel’s knife and steady as the hand wielding it. The performances match.
Planer is a retired obstetrician adrift, as most of us who remember simpler times are, in a world of unwarrantedly magnified grievance. Tetchy yet professional. Gruber is a traditional professional wife, holding the audience mesmerised bringing the work into focus releasing years of carefully stored emotion.
As guest, Dorothea Myer Bennett manages to rationalise the seemingly irrational, retaining sympathy as her character expands at the speed of a car airbag heading towards collision.
Back to where it all began, second play, “Marriage” by Alexis Zegerman has Verity Johnson’s ingenious set transformed at the flick of a tablecloth into a local restaurant where a first date between Adrian (Sam Thorpe-Spinks) and Eva (Abigail Weinstock) is failing to happen several times.
Grumpy waitress Sara (Dorothea Myer-Bennett – very neat transformation from an actor with the broadest range) and regular Godfrey (Nigel Planer – taking his complex from the first play up several notches) observe and commentate respectively.
If the initial time-play is hardly original, what develops is unexpected and quietly captivating. It may help if you understand the Edgware references without Thorpe-Spink’s spectacularly nerdy explanations; more importantly the whole must be received without Weinstock’s lofty disdain.
He turns out to have what she can only pretend to, and Godfrey’s interventions are as he says, in service of millennia of Jewish history. A powerful metaphor and lesson in the importance of being open to vulnerability if life partners are to be met; future happiness depends on it.
From a rough first date to disaster of a different kind, that which has befallen Golda Meir in last play of the evening, Ryan Craig’s “Death”.
A lengthy physiology lecture from patriarch and doctor Adrian Schiller as Dan, before we adjourn to son Adam’s (Dan Wolff) grotty post-divorce Batchelor pad, in which daughter Leah (Abigail Weinstock) is planning elaborately for her grandmother’s demise.
The least obvious of the trilogy, Craig layers the decomposition of relationships between parents and children, siblings and lovers. He arranges them in some kind of order, then plays with the scale to magnify or reduce as required to build his story.
He has done considerable research, and nobody will resist finding out if one fact is true (it is - Amazon.co.uk). If it all sounds serious, it really is not as Craig consistently ups the black comedy quotient.
It is easy to believe in Wolff and Weinstock as brother and sister. The snippy rivalry, contrasting outlooks only siblings can take out of habit. Uniting them a detached father as Schiller’s emotional constipation resists always making a connection with his offspring.
The final funeral, the reading of the eulogy from well-designed appropriately decorated sheets, the saying of the Kaddish (Jewish memorial prayer for the dead) as the Lord looks on (lovely touch by director Kayal Feldman) and we have perhaps learned something more than expected.
The title of the trilogy is a clever play on words. This is the arc of Jewish life, the ark which contains the scrolls of Jewish law in synagogue from which Jews take their way of life by millennia of sages’ study. An ark carrying people in pairs and more through life.
Celebrating the unique take such long history and devotion to faith has given the writers, protagonists and community on life, this is an experience that could only be more Jewish if performed in Yiddish.
Three clever plays, with more links than you would think possible given they are by three different, equally talented, writers are given compelling performance by seven actors and a director seeing how to unobtrusively join up an evening for maximum effect. They won't change your life, but will certainly add a little Talmudic style pondering to it.
4 stars.