Year in Review: Theatre in 2018 - The Jewish Chronicle

The best came at the beginning. But in a rather mixed year of Jewish theatrical contributions, I’ll save it to the end.

Granted, there were highlights throughout the year. Among them a seven-hour American epic two-parter with a Jewish central character, probing the social and political legacy of the Aids epidemic. And no, it wasn’t Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, but Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance. Central to the story is Jewish, gay Eric (Kyle Stoller) for whom preserving memories of those who died from Aids becomes no less urgent than honouring victims of the Holocaust.

With the help of Stephen Daldry’s direction, Lopez’s achievement can hardly be exaggerated. There are moments and characters in this play that have the eloquence and potency of Tennessee Williams. And, like Kushner, it blends perfectly the personal and political.

Later in the year, another American story burst on to the scene with the National Theatre’s revamped version of Stefano Massini’s European hit, The Lehman Trilogy. This resulted in this country’s greatest Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale saying “Baruch Hashem” a lot. In The Lehman Trilogy, he says it with thanks for being the first Lehman to step safely on to American soil.

But given its subject —the Jews whose banking dynasty went bankrupt and triggered a worldwide financial crisis — there may have been Jewish members of the audience intoning “Baruch Hashem” for the way Sam Mendes’s production avoided the antisemitic tropes that so often, even unintentionally, go with stories about Jews and power.

Alfred Molina’s “talky, thinky Jew”, abstract artist Mark Rothko returned in John Logan’s play Red. The revival remains an excellent portrait of one man, slightly less than ideal given that Logan’s work is a two-hander. Meanwhile, the late Harold Pinter is honoured at the West End theatre which bears his name in a starry season of his sketches, poems and short plays. The premise seems to be that all Pinter’s work was good: not the case. The best is probably to come, not least Tom Hiddleston in Pinter’s searing relationship play Betrayal.

But it’ll have to go some to beat the relationship in Annie Baker’s John, at the National. Central is the relationship between Elias and Jenny whose relationship is in a rocky phase when they book into a strange B&B in Gettysburg.

One of their early exchanges might seem innocuous. Jenny says “I don’t know why that turned into a fight,” and Elias says, “That wasn’t a fight.” Those who are alive to the cultural differences that can appear in a relationship between a Jew and a gentile might recognise a thing here. And that thing is that a Jew in a relationship may think he or she is having a conversation, while the non-Jew might see it as a huge argument. But those closely observed cultural differences are only one layer of a stunning piece of work by the American Baker who is the daughter of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother.

Following her play The Flick, this was a continuation of what felt like nothing less than a newly invented form of theatre — one that finds the drama in mute but closely observed behaviour of someone on their own. It was the perfect start to the year.

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