It’s nearly dinnertime in the Rosenberg’s Edgware household, and since David and Lesley combine cliché with know-how – they want to feed everyone all the time, and they are professional kosher caterers – that ought to be good news. But this is no ordinary evening.
David’s old friend Saul is coming to discuss the contract for his daughter’s wedding, which may save the Rosenberg business. Son Johnny is out thumping people, while daughter Ruth has stirred up their conservative Jewish community with her work on Israeli human-rights abuses. As for their elder son, who went to Israel as a soldier: his funeral is tomorrow morning.
Ryan Craig, who adapted ‘Our Class’ for the National, is too astute to muck up his play with complicated arguments about Israel’s right to exist, although there are correlations between this community’s flaws and problems in the Middle East, not least a lot of spouting about solidarity by people engaged in tearing each other apart.
But he is too set on keeping things simple: so, Ruth is an icy goody two-shoes, Johnny an Asbo-meriting casebook study and grieving David, despite wonderful Henry Goodman’s best efforts, is a Jewish Willy Loman. We know what’s coming to him long before dinner, and this makes the plot flaws even harder to swallow, particularly the ludicrous disregard for the family’s grief. In no religion do friends turn up with bad news the night before a funeral, yet here they form an orderly queue.