Christmas Day at the Almeida Theatre – review

The Christmas show at the Almeida Theatre over the past five years could form a miserabilist sub-genre of drama: “In the Bleak Midwinter”. The bleak Nine Lessons and Carols: stories for a long winter of 2020, was followed by the even bleaker Spring Awakening. Tennessee Williams’ study of madness and loneliness, A Streetcar Named Desire, arrived in 2022, and his study of alcoholism and loneliness, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 2024.

In between, the North London theatre offered the extraordinarily bleak Cold War in 2023. Now Sam Grabiner, Olivier Award-winning writer of Boys on the Verge of Tears, gets a chance to cheer everybody up with Christmas Day, a play whose content breakdown warns it contains “male nudity, blood, drug use, dead animals, vomiting, discussion of antisemitism, Islamophobic, anti-Black and antisemitic words, references to the Holocaust, discussion and description of violence and conflict, and references to Gaza, child abuse and bereavement.”

It is a more interesting and better play than that bald description implies; it is also pretty bleak.

Its setting (designed with detailed realism by Miriam Buether) is a sort of squat in a former office building, shabby and unwelcoming, where an industrial heater overhead suddenly flares up like a frightening dragon, and the Northern line tube trains rumble below. In the opening scene, Nigel Lindsay, as Elliot, is looking warily at a lighted Christmas tree. “Strange things aren’t they?” he says. “They’re sort of perverted.”

The opening line sets the tone for a disconcerting and disconnected Christmas dinner where a fractured Jewish family gather over a Chinese meal, their idiosyncrasies and differences cruelly exposed by the coming together of the season. Each has a different attitude to being Jewish and what it means.

Elliot, scarred by his mother’s experiences as a refugee, is a tough, old-fashioned paterfamilias, fiercely pro-Israel. His son Noah (a sweet and febrile Samuel Blenkin) is desperate to escape the burden of history; he just wants everyone to get on and not argue; his daughter Tamara (Bel Powley), frail and anxious, is of the view that Jews should be on the side of the suffering of the world. “We’re the bad guys now,” she shouts. “I don’t want to be the bad guys anymore.”

Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) has just returned from Tel Aviv, where he feels taller, happier and more integrated. Leavening their conversation is the wonderfully vague and gentle Maud (Callie Cooke), Noah’s girlfriend and protector, and a variety of crazed intruders (all played by Jamie Ankrah) who wander through the room either stoned out of their mind or looking for the local drug dealer.

The play is often funny, catching exactly the family tensions – the hyper competitive quizzing, the dislike of a new girlfriend – that rip apart many family Christmases. Grabiner’s writing is chewy and tough-minded. It tries to do a lot, raising so many difficult, complex questions that are impossible to resolve, and doesn’t always feel fully realised. But its portrait of inherited trauma is convincingly explored and James Macdonald’s direction, responsive to each change of mood, ready to allow silence as well as explosions, makes it intense and compelling.

The acting is uniformly strong. Lindsay is currently hitting a rich vein of battered, comic form in his roles, and his timing is, as always, immaculate. But he also uncovers a ferocity in Elliot, a belief that his views are right and cannot be challenged. As Tamara, Powley is like a coiled spring of energy and anxiety, her eyes filling with tears as she describes the situation in Gaza, her body recoiling as if hit when Aaron turns on her, her vulnerability always apparent. And Cooke’s Maud has an artless grace, a desperate longing to reconcile that springs from her own troubled past.

Christmas Day isn’t perfect, but it is consistently impressive, a bold and original attempt to tackle huge issues. I’d take its bleak probing over a jolly panto any day.