The Arc – A Trilogy of New Jewish Plays.
Soho Theatre | ★★★✩✩

Last year was always going to be a hard act to follow. When the inaugural Emanate season burst into life with a series of new and gripping Jewish world premieres, the writing and acting talent on display was revelatory.

This year, the new theatre company’s producers have taken three of the biggest names from that event — and indeed from British theatre — and given Amy Rosenthal, Alexis Zegerman and Ryan Craig the daunting challenge of consolidating last year’s wild success.

Each have written a short play, all well directed by Kayla Feldman, about three of life’s milestones: Birth (Rosenthal), Marriage (Zegerman) and Death (Craig).

With an impressive cast including Nigel Planer, Caroline Gruber and Dorothea Myer-Bennett, each of the works is a funny, poignant sideways take that approaches its subject from unexpected angles.

Abigail Weinstock (c) Danny With A Camera

Abigail Weinstock (Photo: Danny with a Camera)

Yet if this were a restaurant — the setting of Zegerman’s Marriage in which Eva (Abigail Weinstock) and Adrian (Sam Thorpe-Spinks) are on a faltering first date — you might at the end of the evening feel you had eaten three hors d’oeuvres instead of a full meal.

Rosenthal’s Birth begins the life cycle with a retired obstetrician Michael (Planer) and his wife (Gruber) who are at home doing the crossword when an unexpected guest arrives.

Naomi (Myer-Bennett) claims to have been delivered by Michael three weeks early 50 years ago, and all to accommodate his holiday plans.

Rosenthal is a master of sustaining suspense in everyday situations. Is Naomi intending to sue her mother’s doctor, who was once the preferred obstetrician of every pregnant Jewish woman in north London?

And can our disappointments ever be the responsibility of someone other than ourselves?

The question posed by Zegerman’s play is yet more existential; whether even “non-practising” Jews should feel the responsibility to further the Jewish race by having Jewish children.

Weinstock’s smooth but sceptical Eva and Wolff’s gauche Adrian are given more chances than most to consider the idea. The next table is occupied by the elderly Godfrey (Planer) who is nudging two of his “chosen people” in the right direction.

Meanwhile, Craig’s subversive play ends the evening with a Kaddish intoned like you have never seen before.

The undertow of this comedy in which Adrian Schiller plays a successful surgeon and father to a neurotic son (Dan Wolff) reveals how Jewish ritual binds even fractured families.

As with the preceding works the play’s context is almost entirely Jewish, however.

Caroline Gruber (c) Danny With A Camera

Caroline Gruber (Photo: Danny with a Camera)

What I miss from last year is how Emanate’s plays confidently intersected with the wider non-Jewish world without the self-consciousness that has so often gone with being British and Jewish.

This year is enjoyable fare which on this preview night is by turns thought-provoking and unexpectedly moving. Yet the works exist within a comfort zone which is not where the most challenging theatre lies.