A ‘serious’ comedy about Anne Frank?
Writer Nathan Englander and director Patrick Marber bring Shoah talk fuelled by wine to the stage
Francine Wolfisz is the Features Editor for Jewish News.
When meeting people for the first time, American writer Nathan Englander confesses he and his sister would play an unusual game. Rather than judging their acquaintances by what they wore or said, they would weigh up how that person would act if the Holocaust were to happen again.
“My sister would say, ‘I really like that guy – he’d hide us – but his wife? She would turn us in.’ Trust of those we had only just met was always based on who would hide us.”
The darkly wry “Anne Frank Game”, as it was known in the Englander household, would later feature at the core of one of the prolific writer’s most critically-acclaimed short stories.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank was selected as a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has been adapted for the West End stage under the masterful helm of British playwright, screenwriter and director Patrick Marber. Both are in high spirits when we meet during a break in rehearsals for the “serious comedy”, which is set to open at the Marylebone Theatre next month.
Englander’s story, which was first published in The New Yorker Magazine in 2011 before this latest reworking, centres around two couples: Phil (played by The Big Bang Theory’s Joshua Malina) and Debbie (Doc Martin actress Caroline Catz) from Florida; and their friends Yerucham (Simon Yadoo) and Shoshana (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), who are visiting from Jerusalem, some years after emigrating to Israel and becoming strictly-Orthodox.
Taking inspiration from Raymond Carver’s well-known story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the foursome in Englander’s vision drink and descend on a path of revelation as they debate faith, religion and the Holocaust.
Although many of the themes are serious, the chatter is also light-hearted and heavily sprinkled with Englander’s Jewish witticisms.
Interestingly, the droll 54-year-old writer – who grew up strictly-Orthodox before becoming “as secular as I was able” – reveals he had an “obsession” with the Holocaust for years, even while none of his immediate family members were impacted. It is a condition, he insists, not unique to him and shared by many within the Jewish community.
Englander jokingly describes himself as “a Mayflower Jew” with ancestry stretching back an impressive four generations in the US and yet says he has always felt a deep connection to those persecuted at the hands of the Nazis.
“I must have been almost 40 when I realised that thinking about this, playing this game with my family, was so deeply pathological not just for us, but also many generations of American Jews, that we order our world according to the Holocaust.
“I really wanted to explore that and how the Holocaust has been used, manipulated and controlled in a bid to own that history.”
While Englander openly speaks about his obsession, Marber – who grew up in a Reform Jewish family in south London – sits very much at the opposite end of the scale, in a place where he can shun thoughts of such “horror”.
When I ask Marber whether he had ever contemplated who might hide him in the event of another Holocaust, he says: “I never thought about it until I read this play and I still don’t think about it. I don’t want to think about it, because it’s too horrible.”
Unlike Englander, Marber, who turned 60 this month, lost several direct relatives in the Holocaust. He candidly describes the moment he first learnt as a young boy about such atrocities as “the loss of my emotional virginity”.
He tells me: “Learning about the Holocaust at school was traumatic and shocking. When I began studying for my barmitzvah, around the age of 11, it was an immediate feeling of, ‘Oh, it could have been me if I had been born not in 1964, but 25 years earlier.’ It was that recognition that it could have been me, my mum and dad, brother, aunts and uncles.
“The Holocaust is not something I thought a great deal about until I became an adult and a father, but it’s become much more part of my consciousness in the past 15 years.
“For me, the Holocaust is a horror. Once you know it, you can’t unknow it, and it’s there with you in your soul for the rest of your days.” If the Holocaust is something they both carry with them, so too is personal experience of antisemitism. For Englander, growing up in a strictly-Orthodox community on Long Island, New York, life was distilled into “the Jews and the antisemites”.
He recalls: “I grew up being chased home from school, getting into fights, things being screamed at me, swastikas appearing on the building. I wore a yarmulke and was very identifiable as a Jew.”
Marber, who grew up in Wimbledon, also felt the sting of prejudice, but says: “You just carry it with you; it becomes a part of who you are.”
The Tony-winning director describes his Reform-Jewish upbringing as “pretty casual, but my Jewish identity was powerful”. He says: “We did Friday night dinner, we said prayers, my father tried to get me to go to shul on a Saturday for many years and so my Jewishness was very present for who I was as a person.”
Both acknowledge their Jewishness has informed their work. Englander laughs and says it would be “absurd for me to pretend I’m unaware my work has lots of Jews in it”.
Marber, however, admits his Jewish identity was more under the surface until recent years when he had “an awakening”. “It was while directing Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt and being in a rehearsal room full of Jews, talking about Jewish things, that I started to feel more Jewish, and also because of the way the world is moving,” he explains. “I’ve sort of come out a bit more, out of necessity and out of choice.”
While Englander wrote his story 12 years ago, he had been working with Marber just before October 7 to adapt the story for the West End stage. That version is now something Marber would call “a museum piece”, according to Englander.“We agreed on a draft around October 1,” he muses. “While people have been busy tweeting and Instagramming and trying to simplify one of the more complex and horrible historical moments for Jews and Muslims or Israelis and Palestinians – however you want to split everyone up – I’ve been working round the clock with Patrick. It’s not a Gaza play and it’s not a Bibi play, but we do acknowledge October 7.”
He adds: “Working with Patrick has been a joy and an education, but also very intense. We have lived and breathed this story to rebuild the ideas around this new reality.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank runs at the Marylebone Theatre from 4 October to 23 November, marylebonetheatre.com
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