We are sitting in a box room that is so small the Almeida Theatre staff call it the chokey. However, any sense of claustrophobia is mitigated by the play texts that line the wall, many of which, if not all, have been performed on the illustrious Islington theatre’s stage.
I was drawn to the play because it shows a group of Jews arguing about a family situation. It shows we don’t have tails and cloven feet and are just human beings
“He believes in the nation state and that Israel can do no wrong,” continues Lindsay who has made the low office chair his own with a languorous, proprietorial slouch.
If Lindsay’s character could be described as being on the right of Jewish diaspora politics, his daughter who is played by the Jewish actor Bel Powley has a more liberal or left outlook, a view which Lindsay says is not so tethered to the traumas of 20th-century Jewish experience.
“The play is about how one identifies as a Jew,” he says summing up a subject that is the conversational equivalent of perpetual motion.
Director James Macdonald, who directed Grabiner’s first play, describes Christmas Day as “a debate play about faith and longing” which takes the audience to “somewhere unexpected and powerful”.
The cast also includes the Jewish Jacob Lloyd-Fortune who starred as the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in the film Midas Man, and another fast-riser, Samuel Blenkin, who recently played Hamlet in the RSC’s Radiohead-Shakespeare mashup Hamlet Hail to the Thief. Lindsay is the production’s most senior member of the cast, and unlike much of the younger talent attached to the play can fairly described as fully risen.
Nigel Linsday (Photo: Marc Brenner)[Missing Credit]
Over the last three decades or so, during which he reckons he has performed 48 plays, Lindsay has established himself as an actor who brings a certain threat to the stage whether the show is a comedy such as the Barbican revival of Kiss Me Kate, directed by Broadway’s Bartlett Sher, in which Lindsay played one of the gangsters; or Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming alongside Kenneth Cranham’s Max and Danny Dyer’s Joey. True, Lindsay had to suppress the sense of brooding violence while playing Shrek in the West End, (for which he was nominated for an Oliver Award), just as he did for his Dr Hyman in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, a role for which the qualities of empathy and psychological insight are more appropriate.
But if a director wants an actor who can play the kind of character who is capable of smashing your face in, Lindsay is your man. Is that a description he recognises?
“I do,” he says rather ruefully. “I have an anger within me,” admits the actor who worked for three years as a stockbroker before deciding he hated it enough to apply to bar school and drama school to be either a barrister or an actor. He was accepted by both and went for acting.
“It has definitely mellowed over the years,” he says of the temper, which he ascribes to “being insecure about who I am. The imposter syndrome and all that; wanting to be part of a gang and really worried about making a fool of myself, and then sort of defending myself in an over-the-top way.”
Occasionally the red mist has descended when he sees “actors cast in roles they’re palpably unsuited for”. He gets the commercial pressures of mounting a play but what gets his goat are “big stars who are shoehorned into roles they can’t do” just because they can pull in audiences.
Does he have anyone in mind? I ask expecting the normal evasive response.
“You’re talking to the man who did [David Mamet’s] Speed-the-Plow with Lindsay Lohan,” he says unhesitatingly. The star of the mother-daughter body-swap films Freaky Friday and the recently released Freakier Friday had “barely stood on a stage in all her life,” says Lindsay. “That was quite a traumatic experience for all concerned,” he says.
But while the anger bubbled a couple of times during that job, the talent attached to his current play means there is little chance he will have cause to “lose it”.
“When I read Sam’s play, one of the reasons I liked it was because it shows a group of [Jewish] people arguing in a family situation,” says Lindsay. He was particularly drawn to a play that shows “we don’t have tails and cloven feet and are just human beings,” at a time when “antisemitism is so big”.
That he has never really encountered antisemitic prejudice is largely, he thinks, because he is a secular Jew. “But things have changed,” he says. “After the Manchester attack [at Heaton Park synagogue] you realise that there are people in this country who want to take a knife and kill someone because they’re Jewish. That could have been me going to synagogue in Kenton [where he was raised] on Yom Kippur.”
“I’m very proud of being Jewish, but I haven’t shouted it from the rooftops. Now suddenly it doesn’t matter whether you shout it or not.” Then, with just enough comic timing to suggest his next comment is not altogether serious, he says: “I did think I was going to be murdered when I did Four Lions.”
This is the Chris Morris film of 2010 about four Muslim British men who form a hapless jihadist cell. Alongside Riz Ahmed’s Omar, Kayvan Novak’s Waj and Adeel Akhtar’s Faisal, Lindsay played Barry who the actor reckons was probably born Jewish but converted to Islam.
A couple of days before this meeting Lindsay saw the film for the first time in ten years at screening shown to film fans followed by a Q&A. “I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell Chris Morris was brave,’” he says. “It’s not anti-Islam, but it is about four idiots who happen to be suicide bombers. I’m not sure it could be made now.”
Even it were to be made, you get the sense that today Lindsay would be more interested in playing some of the classic Jewish roles that have eluded him. He has nearly played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on at least three occasions. He “got very close” to the MGM remake of the Topol film which has yet to be released and on another occasion was set to play the shtetl milkman for a theatre company but the plans were dropped after a regime change.
What about Shylock? I ask nodding towards the shelf of Shakespeare to my right.
“It’s a tricky one. I had this discussion with Jason Isaacs and he thinks no one should play Shylock or Fagin because he believes they’re really antisemitic. I’m not so sure. I’d play Shylock,” he says after a beat.
And certainly I can see him as Shakespeare’s tormented Jew, the perfect role for all that anger.
Christmas Day is at Almeida Theatre until January 8, 2026
almeida.co.uk
