The Assembled Parties: ‘Oberman is in the form of her life’ ★★★★

The description of the late Richard Greenberg, who died this year, as the Noël Coward of his generation says a lot about the New York playwright’s wit but nothing about his Jewishness. This UK debut of his 2013 play, which imagines what Christmas might be like for Upper West Side Jews, does both.

In Blanche MacIntyre’s beautifully performed production the somewhat detached Jewish relationship to Christmas – for those Jews who dabble – is never absent. The towering Christmas tree centre stage is the soulless, gaudy plant of a household where the ritual is only adopted and never truly felt. When the play shifts from Christmas Day in 1980 to exactly 20 years later, Tracy-Ann Oberman’s Faye flings the tinsel on that year’s tree with the care of someone chucking dirty laundry into a basket.

Oberman is in the form of her life as the savvy, bling-bedecked sister to Julie (Broadway’s Jennifer Westfeldt) whose love of the Christian holiday is a chance to play domestic goddess and indulge the delusion that all is well with her apparently gilded existence.

Yet Julie’s sick young son Timmy is in bed while his older brother Scotty (Alexander Marks) may not be Harvard material after all. Meanwhile, the sisters’ husbands are almost at war. In a change of gear the revolving set sweeps us to the living room where Faye’s blue-collar spouse Mort (a pitch- perfect David Kennedy who could star in a Jewish version of The Sopranos) is blackmailing Julie’s Ben (Daniel Abelson) over a matter of the necklace that Julie has but which Mort thinks should belong to Faye.