REVIEW: The Wanderers, Marylebone Theatre

Considering how much pain its characters reveal over the course of their marriages, The Wanderers is a surprisingly entertaining watch.

Two New Yorkers from different generations – Schmuli, a Chasid bound by tradition and Abe, an angsty modern writer who has never really considered the implications of his Jewishness until it bites him on the bum – struggle with the burden and responsibilities of their identity. Meanwhile their wives struggle with the limitations of being married to self-absorbed men who risk all by putting the needs and happiness of the women in their lives at the bottom of their list of priorities.

Each in an arranged marriage despite the younger couple being raised by free-thinking mothers, the two pairs of characters are linked in a slow reveal which maddened some American critics, despite one having declared this work by award-winning playwright Anna Ziegler, who originally envisaged it as two marital dramas she later decided to stitch together, the finest play of the year. So at the Marylebone Theatre, where The Wanderers is making its London debut, an intriguing set device sees the actors helping the story along with white marker pens with which they introduce the characters and their preoccupations on a clear screen.

There is a fifth character – the beautiful shiksa who has been the fantasy and undoing of many a romantic Jew wondering if there’s more to life than the balabusta of a wife he’s been dealt – and playing with fire in a bid to find out.  Julia, the filmstar with whom Abe starts an email relationship after spotting her in the audience for one of his readings, is played with appropriate luminosity by Anna Popplewell, while Katerina Tannenbaum’s Esther also shines – perhaps a little too brightly for a Chasidic wife, albeit one who seems destined to throw off her shackles from the minute she is discovered dancing to forbidden music in the not-so-private sanctuary of her own kitchen.

All three of the female characters – Paksie Vernon plays Sophie, Abe’s wife whose half-Jewish, half-black heritage sees her frustrated by society’s expectations that her own identity and creative endeavours must be defined by both slavery and the Holocaust – are drawn in more detail by Ziegler than the two men, caricatures we have seen before, Schmuli in leaving-the-sect dramas like Unorthodox, Abe in any number of early Woody Allen characters. But Eddie Toll and Alexander Forsyth respectively do not disappoint with their performances, portraying the pathos of each character finding that his children are his Achilles’ heel.

Set designer Jan Pappelbaum’s minimal but innovative staging is a character in its own right, thanks to the few but carefully-chosen props which metamorphose to drive the action. A stageful of confetti is easy to gather up and sprinkle whenever snow, a recurring trigger of dramatic events, needs to be seen and experienced by characters, while a huge bale of muslin does quadruple duty as a bridal veil, a pillow, the tablecloth at the heart of every Jewish home and even a baby.

Credit to the performers for learning the lines they must write in marker as well as those they speak, and to award-winning director Igor Golyak, described by the New York Times as one of the most inventive in his field, for pulling the whole production together in a way that keeps the attention focussed on the preoccupation of the moment.

There are many to be explored en route Ziegler’s conclusion that the Wandering Jew lives in every one of us who asks “is this all there is?”, and questions the concept of a bashert. You may not have to be Jewish to play a Jewish character, but I do wish Ziegler had been around to give the actors notes that you don’t pronounce the word at the heart of the action nearly every Jew in the audience will have grown up with “be-shirt”!

The Wanderers is at the Marylebone Theatre until November 29. marylebonetheatre.com