The Holy Rosenbergs: a ‘knotty’ and ‘resonant’ political drama

Ryan Craig’s play “The Holy Rosenbergs”, first staged in 2011, examines the response of a Jewish family in north London to the 2008/09 war in Gaza.

Fifteen years on, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, it feels “strongly resonant, yet curiously like a period piece”, given the horrifying human cost of the more recent conflict. The play is an Arthur Miller-like “collision of the political and personal”.

There are acknowledged echoes of “All My Sons” in the depiction of a family reeling from the loss of a son, a pilot killed fighting with the IDF, and in the suburban mother (Tracy-Ann Oberman) “who daren’t sit still for fear of falling apart”; and there are shades of Willy Loman in the character of the father (Nicholas Woodeson), who is desperate to save his ailing kosher catering company.

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Matters come to a head when their daughter Ruth (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) arrives. A UN lawyer, she is investigating war crimes during the conflict. This has enraged members of their local community, which could be the last straw for her father’s firm.

This gripping play tackles “knotty ethical family dilemmas” as well as fraught geopolitical issues, said Clive Davis in The Times. Yet it also has a “wry humour”: “time and again, you find yourself laughing through the pain while admiring the finely wrought performances”.

It’s an “absorbing” production, but it is quite contrived, said David Jays in The Guardian. Set over one evening, this is “the sort of play where characters representing useful debating positions happen to pop in, carrying crucial reports in buff envelopes”.

The themes debated – including Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, and notions of individual and collective responsibility – remain pertinent and important, said Nick Curtis in London’s The Standard; and there is a “pleasing economy to the way the family is used as a microcosm for a state and a people”. But “the way argument is loaded into the play feels forced”. This is a serious (“and at times seriously funny”) attempt to show how events in Gaza affect Jews elsewhere, “but also a clumsy one”.

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