Faygele at Marylebone Theatre – review

Shimmy Braun started writing Faygele (the Yiddish term for a homophobic slur also starting with ‘f’), his autobiographical first play, during the pandemic when he was a married father of four from an Orthodox Jewish background who had been closeted since his teenage years. Charting the protagonist Ari’s life from his bar mitzvah at 13 to his suicide five years later (not a spoiler), this play is set within an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn in the present day – and explores the tragedy of bigotry in the name of faith.

Ilan Galkoff’s Ari is engaging, mordantly humorous and constantly on the edge of overstepping the mark. Dressed in black with a Star of David tattoo on his arm, he breaks the fourth wall and inhabits a liminal space between life and death as he looks back on his short life and witnesses his funeral, which echoes his bar mitzvah, the two days on which he has the opportunity to be the most important person in the synagogue. According to Ari, the Yiddish language, with its plethora of colourful insults, makes everything sound comical, or at least “less evil”. However, there is no word in their language for “suicide”, so his death is cloaked in euphemisms.

Ari is the eldest of 11 siblings and the “problem” child of his domineering father Dr Freed (Ben Caplan) and his downtrodden mother Mrs Freed (Clara Francis). Dr Freed is a psychologist with little understanding of how other people function and a history of growing up as a secular Jew before his own abusive father became Orthodox during his teenage years. Mrs Freed, meanwhile, has spent practically her entire adult life pregnant or breastfeeding due to the prohibition of birth control; she loves her son the way he is, but has ten other children in need of attention and has been conditioned to submit to her husband and other authority figures.

Andrew Paul gives a warmly humane performance as the kindly Rabbi Lev, who can’t approve of Ari’s “lifestyle” as per the teachings of Leviticus, but is willing to listen and learn. Sammy Stein (Yiftach Mizrahi), a married man who left the community when he came out as gay is surely an avatar for Braun himself, a role model for other men in a similar position while continually learning to adjust to his new situation.

David Shields’s wooden set design is elegant and unobtrusive, with a photograph of Ari as a Bar Mitzvah boy front and centre. The use of short scenes, however, does mean that Hannah Chissick’s production doesn’t flow as naturally as it could. The way in which Ari is repeatedly exploited by older men within the community is brushed off in a rather blasé manner and the way in which the tone shifts from realism to absurdism with the “Turkey King” parable is rather jarring. The play does lapse into melodrama in places but the heartbreak of a life cut brutally short due to cultural intolerance is all too resonant in both religious and secular contexts.