They argue when she sets an examination on a demonstration day so that her students cannot attend without failing their course. They further argue when his published book of poems is dedicated to HER. HE will get into debates about being an activist and imply that if the Jews has been more militant the Holocaust might not have happened and these arguments descend into shocking violence as they lash out at each other.
The Epilogue is set approaching 120 years before, during the Lemberg Pogrom in Poland where a Jewish carpenter Tatte (Richard Katz) is carving a child’s toy ram watched by Baba (Abigail Weinstock). The empty set of the future is now full of furniture and Jewish religious candlesticks as we see the kind of cataclysmic set collapse that Michael Longhurst is gaining a reputation for at the Donmar. I have a Jewish friend who two years ago came back from a trip to Warsaw shocked at how little Jewish history was honoured or even recorded there.
Tom Mothersdale as HIM is impassioned, very talkative as he defends the cause against increasing state control. Abigail Weinstock as HER is quieter and more thoughtful, less impulsive. Both convince, although for me the violence between them shocks rather than is wholly credible but then maybe that violence is a metaphor, a reminder of their genetic history?
This is the second play I’ve seen directed by Elayce Ismail, the first was the magnificent Shedding a Skin and I can see a promising future for her.
The last scene of the Epilogue is a moving description of a pogrom in Poland where HER ancestor meets HIS ancestor on separate sides of the divide. The hurt and fear resonate over the hundred years and a chasm of incompatible difference opens.