The Wanderers – review: Marriage? Be careful what you wish for ★★★★

The cast of The Wanderers (Photo: Mark Senior)[Missing Credit]

One is between strictly Orthodox Esther (Katerina Tannenbaum) and Schmuli (Eddie Toll), the other is a secular union between prize-winning novelist Abe (Alexander Forsyth) and his wife Sophie (Paksie Vernon), also a writer but less successful.

Abe and Sophie live free of religious observance even though the maternal forebears of Sophie, who is of mixed race, belonged to the Orthodox tradition.

All this exposition is packed into Igor Golyak’s production with the aid of a glass wall on which the protagonists map connections to their pasts in white lines like art therapy.

In Abe, Ziegler has created a walking, talking and at times simpering indictment of the writer archetype who places his own creative and personal fulfilment above even the most basic needs of those closest to them.

With the eye of a gold prospector he envies his wife’s heritage. How many writers “have the legacy of the Holocaust and slavery”, he says as if such riches are wasted on his wife.

Doubts that he deserves her become stronger with his infatuation with film star Julia Cheever (Anna Popplewell) who attended the launch of his latest book. This supercharges his self-importance and the writer and actress form a covert e-mail friendship which Abe foments into an electronic affair.

As that marriage suffers, Schmuli and Esther’s also falters. The charm of Schmuli’s diffident, naive affection sours when Esther’s children are taken away because she has an interest in music and getting a job. Esther leaves. Emancipation surely awaits, or so my liberal sensibility hopes.

All this happens in a knotty, ponderous first act which is also informed by Abe’s intellectual outreach to his own family’s Chasidic history. It’s a lot to fit in and I do not blame the two or three people seated to my left for not staying for the second act.

Yet they missed a lot, including a genuinely arresting plot twist that would be a crime to spoil here.

Stick with it. The acting is excellent and like a literary geneticist Ziegler unravels and reveals the legacy of culture that is passed down like a compulsory heirloom.

The Wanderers

Marylebone Theatre