Theatre review: Christmas Day

For the Almeida's last show of the year the audience enters the Stalls via the side door by the dressing rooms; as we don't then encounter a dead bull bleeding crude oil onto the stage, that's setting us up for disappointment right from the off. A dead fox does eventually get dumped on the dinner table of Sam Grabiner's Christmas Day though. The title describes the date when events take place but things are a bit more complex with regard to what exactly is being celebrated, as most of the characters are Jewish and have different opinions on whether or not it's OK to fill the room with the trappings of a Christian holiday. Brother and sister Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Transphobia Ltd Employee Bel Powley) live in an abandoned office building as tenant guardians, along with Noah's girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and various other young people.

They're hosting the siblings' father Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) for lunch, and they'll also be joined by old friend - and Tamara's ex - Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd,) previously known as Jack but now going by his middle name ever since moving to Tel Aviv.

Starting as a black comedy, the play gets increasingly bleak as it becomes apparent Tamara has something she needs to get off her chest, and at the centre of the play is a blazing row between her and her father about Gaza, which in a play that's often bold with the ideas it chooses to deal with feels like the most daring grappling with a subject people are still tiptoeing around. Unfortunately it's probably the least successful, for me, in its execution - regular readers will both know I'm not a fan of dealing with a hot topic by simply staging an argument verbatim.

But this is generally a play that takes risks, with the resulting mix of success and failure. Unusually, the family drama was one of the latter for me, with a lot of the personal developments feeling tacked on. Along with the humour that sometimes comes back to spike through the misery and conflict, the most successful for me was the play's complex exploration of Jewish identity, and what it means for different people.

The family's attitude to their religion is a mix of the genuine and the performative: Their love of storytelling and finding the meaning in those stories and how it connects them to god all feel heartfelt, but they're also having Chinese takeaway on Christmas Day while fully acknowledging that that's a specifically American Jewish stereotype and not their personal tradition. (But exactly how old is Elliot meant to be, if he doesn't know that a bowl of noodles isn't called sushi in CE2025?)

Gaza is an impossible subject for them to discuss because for Elliot it just makes him scream "it's ours" on repeat, while for Tamara it's an existential threat to her own understanding of her people as it makes them the bad guys. (You could also infer that the very idea of a Jewish homeland makes no sense to her as her idea of Jewishness is inextricably linked to exile and diaspora.)

James Macdonald's typically straightforward production has touches of weirdness that add to the tense atmosphere: Miriam Buether's dingy set looks vast and cold but a faulty heater means the characters are overheated literally as well as emotionally, and Jon Clark's lighting takes us abruptly from murkiness to stark bright light and back. Max Pappenheim's eerie sound gives us ominous rumbles from the heater, as well as from the Northern Line below, whose trains occasionally seem to be running despite the Tube being closed for the day, while other residents, all played by Jamie Ankrah, occasionally wander obliviously through the carnage. Christmas Day is far from an unqualified success and doesn't quite justify its running time, but like the ambiguous, open-ended fables the family like to tell each other, it does keep your brain busy.

Christmas Day by Sam Grabiner is booking until the 8th of January at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.