The Holy Rosenbergs review – suburban Jewish family chew over morals and macaroons

Tracy-Ann Oberman stars in this absorbing and timely revival of Ryan Craig’s 2011 comic tragedy, set over one fraught evening

A death in the family is always a reckoning. In this absorbing revival of Ryan Craig’s play from 2011, it is also an unravelling, one in which morality and geopolitics play out on a highly patterned carpet in a Jewish suburban dining room.

It’s 2009 and the Rosenbergs have lost their eldest son, who left north London to fight for Israel. His death is a further blow to the family and its venerable catering company (dad “reckons some ancient relative catered the Last Supper”). There was the suspected food poisoning, while daughter Ruth (a rebarbative Dorothea Myer-Bennett, excellent) is a lawyer investigating human rights abuses in the war on Gaza – an inquiry which only heightens tensions within the community.

Craig describes his plays as “comic tragedies”, and there’s certainly humour in Lindsay Posner’s finely acted production as the Rosenberg parents, never knowingly under-catered, frantically paper over the cracks. Goujons are lauded, macaroons and marble cake foisted on the unwilling.

Tracy-Ann Oberman’s bleary Lesley, ferrying finger bowls and levelling candle wicks, is the family’s glue. Even when she collapses, she’s immediately on her feet (“Oh, don’t make a whole production”). But even she can’t buttress Nicholas Woodeson’s David, a dynamo of self-delusion. David has defiantly mounted pillars beside the front door (“chav palace,” sneers his wastrel younger son) – he’s desperate to be a pillar of the community that is turning its back on him.

Set on a single fraught evening, it’s the sort of play where characters representing useful debating positions happen to pop in, carrying crucial reports in buff envelopes. Despite the spuming argument, it’s the bleak silences when talk fades away that are most eloquent: when Woodeson’s gaze turns inward and we see his defeat.

This is a horribly apposite moment for a revival: British Jewry is embattled but painfully conflicted. Israel wants, muses Adrian Lukis’ legal grandee, to be “a light unto the world” – which is perhaps “an unbearable burden”. For the family too, doing right by principles, community and each other can’t be sustained. Disappointment and fracture seem inevitable.

• At Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 2 May