Review: NotMoses ★★★ – Carry on taking the tablets, there's some epic fun to be had amongst the groans and jokes

Filmmaker Gary Sinyor’s irreverent retelling of the Exodus story starts with the baby left floating on the Nile when the Princess takes up Moses, a nicer baby who doesn’t cry and has a proper - er – Moses basket. NotMoses grows up a slave in Prince Moses’ shadow, until God orders both of them to lead the Israelites out of bondage – though it takes feisty Miriam to lead the Exodus. Synor’s intent was Life of Brian meets The Ten Commandments, but it’s rather more Carry On Taking the Tablets, silly humour that sends up the biblical story and religion. Like the Carry On films it could just get the audience vote and become a cult hit.

Knowledge of the Bible and its language (or the first five books anyway) certainly helps, and Synor displays his lightly, learned in cheder (religion school) and synagogue in his Manchester childhood. It all starts with a comedy canter through the stories of the patriarchs leading up to the plight of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt. The Bible lesson turns out to be an extended sermon from Leon Stewart’s well-meaning, though misguided (and anachronistic) rabbi, ministering to the Hebrew slaves. A bit of popular culture helps too as Joseph inevitably bursts into song …

You can’t fault the cast for playing the characters with sincerity as well as a knowing twinkle, for staying in character and not sending it up unless appropriate.  Greg Barnett invests NotMoses with the determination and frustration of the atheist who doesn’t believe in God, ready to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt without anyone’s help. He is comedy paired with Thomas Nelstrop’s Moses, a preppie budding accountant at the palace who grows the beard and perfects the biblical epic lingo once he's heard God in the Burning Bush - and had his kebabs singed there (ooh, Matriarch!).

There’s the expected cast of stock characters, notably the admirable Jasmine Hyde channeling Amanda Barrie in Carry On Cleo, Niv Patel's pouting, petulant Rameses and Joe Morrow as a camp, crowd-pleasing slave driver. But Moses’ sister, Miriam, is a modern fighter for equal women’s rights in this very patriarchal world and Danielle Bird delivers the strongest and most serious speech of the evening with great compassion and conviction.

Life at number 613 (the number of commandments Jews are supposed to keep - geddit), where NotMoses lives with his slave parents, provides a send up of Jewish family life with a nod to Fiddler on the Roof, the Papa (Dana Haqjoo doubling as a legless Pharoah, squatting on his throne like a Dr Who villain or Dan Dare’s Mekon) bemoaning his lack of riches and the Mama (Antonia Davies) preoccupied with food and finding a nice Jewish girl for her son.

And struggling with a series of diktats heralded by thunder, the chosen people have spotted that the Divine Being is also preoccupied with food, not to mention clothing. In the light of the laws on keeping kosher and synagogue readings from of the Torah in recent weeks dwelling in detail on what priests should wear, Sinyor has a point. This is a family Being too, who has to deal with his difficult adolescent Child (presumably omnipresent rather than anachronistic), an extra dimension to ponder, voiced by 13-year-old Izzy Lee at this performance.

There are, of course, plenty more anachronisms, word jokes and double-entendres, from Jethro, Moses' future father-in-law, offering meat he says “Is-lamb” to the toilet humour of the effects of eating unleavened bread (matzah). It often smacks of student revue or something a synagogue youth drama group might come up with for a fundraiser, which does mean there are actually  real nuggets of crowd-pleasing fun amongst the groans and lamer jokes.

Synor says the project started life as a film script and this shows in the too frequent fadeouts between the many scenes, effectively salvaged though by Carla Goodman’s sparse sets and Lola Post Production’s epic visual effects creating Egyptian palaces and pyramids and an impressive divided Red Sea, to the soundtrack of Erran Baron Cohen’s matching epic music. The plague of rather realistic plastic frogs which rains down on stage and audience alike is a nice (or should that be nasty) touch.

Some years ago, the playwright Steve Waters wrote that working with a good director is rather like going into analysis – however lucid you might feel to yourself, what emerges in the production of a play exceeds your intention. “Your set might be definitive, your dream cast fixed, but your play in the hands of another often yields a far more surprising piece of theatre than you're capable of envisaging.”

It would have been interesting to see what emerged with a theatre director at the helm and without the expectations of West End opening, albeit in the intimate surroundings of the Arts Theatre, but nevertheless, it certainly gets a lot of laughs so it could prove to be that cult hit.

By Judi Herman

NotMoses runs until 14 May 2016, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £19.50-£49.50, at Arts Theatre, Great Newport St, WC2H 7JB, 020 7836 8463. https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk

Review: Next to Her ★★★★ – Powerful game-changer about mental illness based on real-life experience

Asaf Korman’s powerful, challenging film, with script by his wife Liron Ben Shlush, who also stars alongside Dana Ivgy and Yaakov Zada Daniel, explores the symbiotic relationship between 27-year-old Chelli, sole carer for her mentally-challenged younger sister Gabby (24), until she is forced to find her part-time daycare and at the same time embarks on a relationship with Zohar a new work colleague. Ben-Shlush based her story on her own experience of having a mentally disabled sister and worked closely with friend and co-star Dana Ivgy on her role.

The result of the real-life three-way close relationship between Director Korman and his two lead actors is a film that is as painful as it is beautiful in its uncompromising treatment of living with mental illness. Ben Shlush’s strength lies in taking her own experience as a starting point to develop a new story where the boundaries between carer and dependent are blurred. Chelli is no saint but a troubled and difficult young woman with her own needs and demands and failure to recognise boundaries and Ben Shlush pulls no punches in writing and portraying her flaws.

Chelli and Gabby live together in a dark, dingy chaotic apartment, Chelli in sole charge of her sister since their mother has abandoned the responsibility of caring for Gabby that she cannot face. The pair’s lives are closely intertwined, touchingly and sometimes uncomfortably demonstrated by the way they are so often physically intertwined, curled together on the sofa watching films, sleeping and taking baths together and even sharing toothbrushes.

It’s soon evident that Chelli is as dependent on Gabby as her vulnerable younger sister is on her. Ivgy’s Gabby is much more than a wild child, head-banging, out of control and without boundaries – no wonder the neighbours’ complaints force Chelli to find daycare for her, rather than leaving her locked up home alone. But watching her relate to others and not just to Chelli helps the viewer to ‘meet’ her on her own terms – as who she is, rather than what she can never be. Indeed Gabby soon begins to relate to the other residents of the daycare centre (in scenes where actors with special needs give moving performances); and it’s not long before the mutual affection that develops between Gabby and Sveta, who runs the daycare centre, makes Chelli feel uneasy pangs of jealousy.

Perhaps this is one reason why Chelli develops a relationship with the sensitive Zohar, the supply PE teacher at the school where she works. When she brings him home to meet Gabby, he too proves able to relate to her and when he leaves his mother’s home to move in, an uneasy ménage à trois develops. It is again largely Chelli’s own neediness that sets off the unsettling chain of events that follows, where all three cross boundaries.

Korman’s direction and the atmospheric cinematography and soundscape ensure total immersion in the world he creates with his actors. The truth in Ivgy’s extraordinarily naturalistic performance is a testament to the time she spent working in the home where Ben Shlush’s sister lived. Ben Shlush herself creates a complicated young woman in Chelli, caring and needy, selfless and selfish, loveable and spiky. So she is full of contradictions and shaped by the difficult cards that have been dealt to her, the duties she has not shirked. It’s not an easy film to watch, but its power and truth ensures that it is impossible not to be drawn in.

It has been deservedly hugely successful in Israel and wherever it has been seen, both as a powerful and accomplished film and for its understanding of mental illlness and the complexities of caring relationships, of any sort.

By Judi Herman

Next to Her can be watched on BFI Player for £6 or at the following screenings:

Friday 25 – Wednesday 30 March, times vary, £7.50, at MAC Birmingham, B12 9QH; 0121 446 3232. https://macbirmingham.co.uk

Sunday 20 March, 8pm, £8.50, at Glasgow Film Theatre, G3 6RB; 0141 332 6535. www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre

Hear our interview with Dana Ivgy

Review: Mrs Henderson Presents ★★★★ – Vintage British fun in a new musical that evokes good old wartime spirit

Musical theatre doesn’t need to be ground-breaking or stuffed full of numbers that go on to become ‘standards’ to be thoroughly enjoyable. What’s needed is a compelling story, an excellent ensemble and music and lyrics that move the plot along rather than holding up the action. Mrs Henderson Presents is just that – and it’s unashamedly and eccentrically British – with a Jewish protagonist sharing top honours for good measure.

Writer and director Terry Johnson was captivated by the 2005 film Mrs Henderson Presents, the story of the Windmill Theatre in London starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, and he jumped at the chance of developing a musical of the film with leading Jewish lyricist Don Black and composers George Fenton and Simon Chamberlain.

In 1930, recently-widowed Mrs Laura Henderson buys the old Palais de Luxe cinema as a creative diversion and fits it out as a tiny, one-tier theatre, renamed the Windmill. It is, of course, not profitable so she hires Vivian Van Damm to change its fortunes. Van Damm, of Dutch Jewish origin, hits on the idea of ‘Revudeville’, a programme of continuous variety with 18 entertainment acts. But this is also a commercial failure, so they add the daring dimension of nudity to create the allure of the Folies Bergère. To get round the censorship laws policed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, Mrs H argues that since nude statues cannot be banned on moral grounds neither can living statues or tableaux vivants. Hence the ruling "If it moves, it's rude".

This is the true story ripe for transmuting into first cinema and now stage-musical gold. And Van Damm's flair for public relations created the legend of the theatre that "never closed". Newspapers carried pictures of plucky Windmill girls in tin hats on fire-watching duty, and stories of showgirls giving V-signs to German bombers. Indeed, except for a 12-day period in 1939, when all London theatres were ordered closed, the Windmill remained open throughout the Blitz.

The plot inevitably rests heavily on the shoulders of Henderson and Van Damm and the love interest of artiste Maureen and stage hand turned airman Eddie. Tracie Bennett suffuses doughty Mrs Henderson with an extraordinary zest for living, not least in the numbers Whatever Time I Have and Anything But Young, and she captures that marvellous British spirit of no-nonsense eccentricity. Ian Bartholomew's caring Van Damm manages to be at once authoritative and self-deprecating - and not a little surprised at how well his precarious show business is turning out. The plight of Jews in Europe is suddenly placed centre stage when he receives news of the German invasion of Holland and the rounding up of Jews by the Nazis, including his own relatives left behind. Wearing a Star of David armband in solidarity, he expresses his distress in the number Living in a Dream World. There’s fun at his expense too, when Emma Williams’ warm, feisty Maureen challenges all the men in the theatre company to reveal all first if they want the girls to strip off and Mrs Henderson, feigning surprise, exclaims drily “You are Jewish!” Williams displays a lovely dawning  realisation as a woman discovering the 'power of her own presence' as Johnson puts it, notably in her full frontal nude castigation of Mr Hitler as the bombs fall, while Matthew Malthouse's Eddie is at his best trying to 'Fred and Ginger' Maureen.

Johnson directs his own story (first seen at the Theatre Royal, Bath, last year) against Tim Shorthall's set that vividly conjures up back and front stage (and roof) of the Windmill, all backcloths and props, superbly lit by Ben Ormerod to suggest both the dinginess of backstage and the bright lights of the front. And there’s a witty single light that comes on above Mrs Henderson's head when she has her ‘lightbulb’ moment - nudity is the way out of their problems! But paradoxically, nude revues need glamorous costumes and Paul Wills comes up with some gorgeous outfits for the revues and lovely period authenticity for the workaday clothing.

It's all good-natured and corny pre-war and war-time chipperness, from the front of cloth comic ("cheeky chappie" Jamie Foreman) to the back-stage crew and dance captain (Samuel Holmes, elegant and waspish in just the right proportions). Robert Hands’s Lord Chamberlain and his secretary (Oliver Jackson) have a lot of fun with the writing team’s homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, the eponymous Lord Chamberlain’s Song. Lizzy Connolly, Lauren Hood and Katie Bernstein as the pioneering  statues baring all for raised wages of 30 bob a week are terrific throughout. They give delightful support (no pun intended)  in a nifty little number with famous paintings ‘dressing’ the set to demonstrate the high art displayed by those ample Rubens and Renoir nudes. Andrew Wright’s choreography is spot-on convincing for the period – and I guess he gets the credit for those tableaux vivants too. And the music and lyrics team of Fenton, Chamberlain and Black have been around long enough to pastiche the 40's style with panache. They give the music their own original flavour too, never allowing the music to overwhelm lyrics that do a nice job moving on the plot. There's a debate to be had as to whether the portrayal of such nudity in 2016 is inappropriately exploitative or empowering but judging by the response the night I saw the production, audiences are enjoying the fun and sharing it with the cast onstage – clothed and unclothed.

By Judi Herman

Mrs Henderson Presents runs until Saturday 18 June, 7.30pm, £10-£97.50, at Noel Coward Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4AU; 0844 482 5140. www.mrshenderson.co.uk

Review: Poppy + George ★★★★ – A beguiling, thought-provoking exploration by Diane Samuels of identity and possibility after the Great War

The year is 1919. The Great War is finally over and Poppy Wright, inspired by her suffragette teacher, arrives in London from the north of England to make her mark, rather than stay in service as a nanny. In the heart of the East End, in a back alleyway, she finds work in Smith’s tailoring and costumiers’ workshop. There she meets not only Smith, the Russian Jewish tailor with a Chinese past, but also George the chauffeur and war hero and Tommy Johns, the music hall female impersonator, also back from the trenches.

This beguiling, thought-provoking play, from the writer of the hugely successful Kindertransport, explores a time of change and opportunity after the cataclysm of the First World War and the subsequent influenza flu pandemic, when all classes questioned their subsequent lives and their roles in a new, modern era. Poppy is increasingly entranced by the freedoms held out by the suffragette movement, at the same time as falling in love with George, while the supportive Smith consoles Tommy as he attempts to reconcile with a wife and child he has not seen for years.

David Holmes lighting works magic with Ruari Murchison’s open set, all brickwork and fabric storage, with costumes flying above that are flights of fancy in themselves – plus the all-important piano – to create an enchanted space in which the unexpected can happen. And perhaps taking a cue from Polonius’ saw “the clothes doth oft proclaim the man”, she explores how those garments can be used as ‘shape-changers’ to fashion an individual’s  image   The sound and composition by Gwyneth Herbert, reflecting, as she says the “bawdy music hall, the rhythm of sewing machines and shadowy, uneasy echoes" wonderfully evokes the world of possibilities in which the four characters dwell.

Jennie Darnell directs Samuels’ exploration of gender identity and new possibilities in a changing world with a charmingly light and good-humoured touch that never preaches or lectures. Together Darnell and Samuels conjure the pathos of the fading music hall and its artistes after the Great War. Nadia Clifford’s luminous warm-hearted Poppy captures a woman starting to open her mind to those new possibilities, and teetering on the brink of exploring life with George, swaggering Rebecca Oldfield, comfortable in her skin and her chauffeur’s braces and trousers. Jacob Krichefski , an imposing bushy presence, beautifully conveys Smith’s exotic past and intriguing hinterland; and multi-talented actor/musician Mark Rice-Oxley gives an outstanding and deeply affecting performance as Tommy, believably making up tunes and lyrics on the hoof.

Twenty years after its first incarnation as Turncoat, a one-act play Samuels wrote for young people’s company Theatre Centre, in an increasingly gender blind world, she reminds us that it's still good to dare to leap into the unknown and to question our roles. And there's no better place do that than in the former music hall that is the current Watford Palace Theatre.

By Judi Herman

Poppy + George runs to 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £12-£22.50, at Watford Palace Theatre, 20 Clarendon Rd, WD17 1JZ; 01923 225671. http://watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

Listen to Diane Samuels on JR OutLoud discussing Poppy + George and her new oratorio, Song of Dina.

Review: Battlefield ★★★★ – Peter Brook returns to the Mahabharata with a meditation on the aftermath of war that will stay with audiences

Thirty years ago, the great and influential Jewish theatre practitioner Peter Brook worked with writer Jean-Claude Carriere and a large cast from the company who had gathered around him in Paris to dramatise The Mahabharata: the Sanskrit epic of the mighty Bharata family torn apart by a great war. The result was nine hours of mesmerising epic theatre, which I was fortunate enough to see in a Glasgow tramshed transformed by red earth into the Indian subcontinent. Now aged 90, working with his long-term collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, he returns to just one section of the mighty epic, which they've called Battlefield.

This meditation on the sorrow and pity of war, eloquent and moving in its extraordinary simplicity, is sadly both timely and timeless as we continue to commemorate two World Wars, while the world is ripped apart and whole peoples put to flight by conflict in Syria and elsewhere. Battlefield is about the aftermath of war and especially internecine struggle within dynasties, here two great families, the Pandavas and Kauravas. The five Pandava brothers may have triumphed over their cousins the hundred sons of the blind King Dritarashtra, but for Yudishtira, oldest of the Pandavas who must now become king, it is a Pyrrhic victory. He has lost so much and so many family members and confederates lie dead on the field of battle. So he finds he has all too much in common with the old blind King he has defeated.

And so many themes and threads in this story sound as familiar as the weekly Torah portions and Haftorah readings you can hear in synagogues around the world every Shabbat. For David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan, “The beauty of Israel is slain among thy high places,” and his later raw cry over the death of his traitor son Absalom, “Oh, Absalom, Absalom, my son…” resonate with the anguish of these survivors of battle, both victor and vanquished. There is even the story of a baby pulled from a river where his mother has abandoned him floating in a basket. His rescuers are princely and he grows up to be the mighty warrior Karna.

The glory of this production, little more than an hour long, is its stunning simplicity. It is performed on a thrust stage, again covered by that orange-red dust, by four powerful performers – at the same time physical and cerebral – who morph sinuously from one role to another as necessary. Nobody is credited with the simple design, but Oria Puppo’s streamlined costumes, echoing that theme of the modern and timeless, are enhanced by huge bolts of red and orange cloth to wonderful effect, serving as robes and cloaks, rivers, the elements of fire and earth, storms and even untold riches. Philippe Vialatte’s mood-making lighting too seems like an extra character. And the whole is brilliantly underscored and orchestrated by the drumming of master musician Toshi Tsuchitori, whose rhythms eloquently enhance and alter the mood and pace.

Stories are folded within stories, and amidst that sorrow and pity there are plenty of flashes of humour, albeit dark or rueful. Each performer is singular and all work wonderfully together. Sean O’Callaghan is a huge and imposing presence, especially moving as the blind and bereaved King Dritarashtra, but ruefully comical as a worm in danger of being crushed. To Jared McNeill falls the role of the victorious Yudishtira, as graceful – and abashed – in victory, as the vanquished old King he has toppled. While Ery Nzaramba is both funny and authoritative as the wise men whose advice to the king comes in the form of those parables about a succession of animals including that worm, as well as a pigeon and a mongoose.

Stately Carole Karemera (who plays the pigeon with comic economy) is as capable of huge dignity as the queenly women caught up in the struggle, principally Yudishtira’s mother Kunti, but it is her heartrending Ganga, her terrifying cry of grief and loss at the death of her son that I shall long remember – standing for every bereaved mother indeed.

“For an idea to stick it must be burnt into our memories,” says Brook in his hugely influential meditation on theatre, The Empty Space. The singularly funny and thought-provoking tale of a king who offers more and more of his body to be weighed in the scales against that pigeon till every bone is part of the weigh-in proves to be a telling and memorable metaphor. And then one of the wise men has a parable for the new King in which a mongoose tells a rich man to give away all his riches to the poor. He begins to involve the audience, homing in on various members asking if they are rich or poor. Some fess up to being rich, others assert they are poor and are ‘rewarded’ with some of those red and orange cloths. The last of these ‘lucky’ recipients finds his lap piled so high he cannot move and can barely applaud at the end. It is the image of this discomfiture, which so perfectly embodies the ambiguity of riches – and indeed victory – that sticks in my memory. The storytelling of Brook and Estienne accrues power even as they continue to strip it bare to the bone.

By Judi Herman

Battlefield runs until Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £10-£35, at Young Vic Theatre, 66 The Cut, SE1 8LZ; 020 7922 2922. www.youngvic.org

Review: Jeepers Creepers ★★★ – Get perhaps a bit too up close and personal with supreme Jewish comic writer/performer Marty Feldman

Marty Feldman features as the world's favourite Jewish vampire in one of my favourite sketches ever, with the punchline, “Oi, have you got troubles,” when the vampire hunter holds up his cross. He was the writer/comedian with the wild hair and staring eyes, the result of a botched operation for Graves’ disease, though they stood him in good stead as the creator of some of the funniest characters ever seen on small or big screen. Think ‘Young’ Frankenstein's hunchbacked henchman Igor in Mel Brooks' movie. Indeed he is sort of undead in Robert Ross’s new biodrama, directed by Feldman’s old mucker and lifelong admirer, Terry Jones. It opens with silent film titles on a screen at the back (in appreciation of Feldman’s appearance in another Mel Brooks film, Silent Movie), announcing ‘three years’ dead’, then two, then six months, each title accompanied by the appearance of a ghostly luminescent skull in a glass case, until Feldman is alive again and not so much kicking as contorting – for he is indeed in Igor mode, complete with hunchback prosthetic.

David Boyle’s frenetic, elastic recreation of Feldman engages with the audience – in my case one-to-one, for he lures me briefly onto the small cramped stage set up as a claustrophobic, Stateside hotel room – be ready to take part if you sit in middle of the front row!

Happily his partner on stage is Rebecca Vaughan as his life partner Lauretta Feldman. The year is 1974, Young Frankenstein is about to be released and Feldman is about to hit the big time in the USA. The couple are playing a waiting game, holed up in the hotel the night before Feldman is due to appear on a prime-time chat show. The warning in the foyer that herbal cigarettes are used in this production is not in vain. The Feldmans chain-smoke their way through the night and Marty drinks his way through it too, while Lauretta leafs through Vogue as her efforts to persuade him to get to sleep prove futile.

So it’s a night of dissecting previous triumphs and disasters and for Lauretta at least, nervously anticipating what might go wrong in front of millions of viewers the next evening.

We learn that Feldman is a womaniser as well as a hard drinker (though we also learn that he knows that home is where the heart is and always goes back to Lauretta); and we are present when he has his fatal heart attack at the tragically young age of 48 in a Mexican hotel room. But I’m not sure that those who don’t already know his work (and love it, for I’m sure to know it is to love it), will pick up the references to his extraordinary back catalogue of radio and TV script writing and appearances – including co-writing Round the Horne on radio and The Army Game and The Frost Report for TV, and writing and appearing in iconic shows, such as At Last the 1948 Show and his own series Marty. But if it makes folk seek out the work then that’s no bad thing – and they can always read playwright Robert Ross’s well-reviewed biography of Feldman, Marty Feldman, The Biography of a Comedy Legend.

Meanwhile there is much to enjoy in the performances of Boyle and Vaughan (he could also tackle Gene Wilder any time he likes, for he’s a dead ringer for Feldman’s co-star in Young Frankenstein), despite their uncomfortable proximity in the confines of the tiny – and herbal smoke-filled – studio theatre.

By Judi Herman

Jeepers Creepers runs until Saturday 20 February, 7pm & 4pm, £20.50-£22.50, at Leicester Square Theatre, 6 Leicester Place, WC2H 7BX; 020 7734 2222. www.leicestersquaretheatre.com

Review: Shylock is My Name – Howard Jacobson’s gift for comedy glisters pure gold

Howard Jacobson was writing J, a novel about a dystopic (non-) Jewish future, when publisher Hogarth invited him to join a relay team retelling Shakespeare in contemporary settings. He was assigned The Merchant of Venice – an inspired choice that allowed him to tell the story from Shylock’s perspective. But Jacobson’s blinder, proving again his extraordinary inventiveness, is to have Shylock slip into present-day Cheshire to share the narrative with his 21st-century counterpart Simon Strulovitch, and chew over his own story as told by Shakespeare. Shylock arrives without fanfare as the story opens, not in Venice but in a bleak Jewish cemetery in Manchester, the city where Jacobson was raised. He is communing with his long-dead wife Leah, “buried deep beneath the snow”. So Shylock engages the reader’s sympathy: within this take on the play is a meditation on loss, as well as scabrous satire on the materialistic celebrity denizens of Cheshire’s ‘Golden Triangle’.

For Jacobson, the beating heart of Shakespeare’s Shylock is not in the defiant speeches he throws in the faces of the Christians who bait him, but in his response to the news that his errant daughter Jessica has exchanged his ring for a monkey. “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” Around these lines Jacobson builds his case for Shylock in love, bereaved – and the lone parent who cannot give his daughter what she needs.

Strulovitch, visiting his mother’s grave recognises Shylock and invites him home. And so begins their relationship, played out in a succession of conversations, the pair ensconced in armchairs, cradling brandy, comparing notes on errant daughters, discussing every move and motive and most of the dialogue that drives Shylock in Shakespeare’s play. They analyse the contradictions driving Strulovitch, “a rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms”, and the butt of antisemitism, above all from the effete aesthete D’Anton (Jacobson’s Antonio) a rival art collector,Strulovitch, visiting his mother’s grave, recognises Shylock and invites him home. And so begins their relationship, played out in a succession of conversations, the pair ensconced in armchairs, cradling brandy, comparing notes on errant daughters, discussing every move and motive and most of the dialogue that drives Shylock in Shakespeare’s play. They analyse the contradictions driving Strulovitch, “a rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms”, and the butt of antisemitism, above all from the effete aesthete D’Anton (Jacobson’s Antonio) a rival art collector who has made smiling sorrowfully at his own Weltschmerz into an art form.

As in the play, the Christians revel in their antisemitism, even vying to top each other’s ‘Jewpithets’ by referring to Strulovitch as “moneybags”, “thick-lips” and “hook-nose”. Strulovitch is arguably worse off than Shylock: his wife is trapped by a stroke in a useless body. His daughter Beatrice, of an age with Jessica, is vividly present, though her father dreads her frequent absences as she threatens to spend the night with a succession of unsuitable men – none of them Jewish, of course. Jessica is absent from the novel, because Jacobson has Shylock caught as if in aspic at the end of Shakespeare’s story. As Shylock says, for him there is no Act Five (his last appearance is leaving court in Act Four).

Jacobson’s gift for comedy glisters pure gold as he makes merciless fun of the self-obsessed celebs surrounding his Portia – a reality TV hostess and plastic surgery addict called Plurabelle, whose full name is Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Christine. And there’s more fun with names. Enter Gratan Howsome, politically incorrect footballer of little brain with the hots for Jewesses, and hunky but vacuous arm-candy Barnaby, Plurabelle’s squeeze and D’Anton’s protégé.

If you know your Shakespeare you’ll hug yourself as you work out Jacobson’s deliciously witty reworking of his plot lines. In a twist on the casket scene, Plurabelle tests her suitors by having them choose between her three cars – a Merc, BMW or humble Beetle. And circumcision is central to an ingenious if potentially grisly plotline. Jacobson plunders his source text and other authors for quotes, sometimes bending their words, always putting them to great use. He grants Shylock his Act Five, calling his last chapter just that. But even this may not be his final act, for if he is Strulovitch’s Shylock, who is to say where he has appeared before or might appear again? Hogarth’s commission is a gripping addition to Jacobson’s writing on what it is to be Jewish.

By Judi Herman

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson, Hogarth Shakespeare, £16.99. Read Judi Herman's interview with Howard Jacobson over on the JR website, first published in the January 2016 issue of Jewish Renaissance.

Howard Jacobson will talk about his book at Jewish Book Week on Sunday 28 February, 5pm, at King’s Place. www.jewishbookweek.com

Review: The Pianist of Willesden Lane ★★★★ – Moving pictures of a mother’s life and music glow in the warmth of a daughter’s love

Adapted by Hershey Felder from the book The Children of Willesden Lane, by Los Angelean pianist Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, this is the true story of Golabek's mother, Lisa Jura. As a young Jewish pianist Jura's dreams about her Vienna concert debut were shattered by the Nazis in the 1938 Anschluss like the glass of Kristallnacht, as her family bravely placed her on the Kindertransport to London.

At first sight the set resembles a music salon or concert hall dominated by a magnificent Steinway grand piano, with mirrors in ornate gilded frames on the walls behind and a bank of flowers around the footlights.

Golabek, a slight red-head dressed simply in black, moves into the light on the steps and turns the warmth of her smile on her audience to address them. Soon she turns to the piano from where she will tell so much of the story about her mother. As her long elegant fingers touch the keys, she reveals one of the most potent reasons for the success of her loving tribute to her mother. Having inherited her mother’s gift, because she took in the stories about her mother's life as Jura taught her to play the piano, Golabek can perfectly time her storytelling to create a seamless weave between words and music, underscoring with great sensitivity and, when necessary, allowing words or music to breathe alone.

It’s a story at once singular and familiar – as in the end perhaps all such stories are. Every Holocaust survivor’s story reveals a family life cruelly cut short, a childhood abruptly ended, heart-breaking separation from loved ones. Jura is no different, her mutual love for her parents and sisters is quite enough to make her story heart-breaking. But her particular heartbreak – and her salvation – is her passion for the piano music she was born to play.

Jura lives for her weekly piano lessons, dreaming of making her professional debut with Grieg’s piano concerto as she crosses Vienna to see her music professor. But this is the week that he has been ordered to give up his Jewish pupils and this is just the start of the restrictions and persecutions the Anschluss and the arrival of the Nazis brings to the city’s Jews. So no sooner has Golabek evoked the rich cultural life of pre-war Vienna, the salons, cafés and concert halls (cleverly illustrated by photographs and film projected on all those mirrors by projection designer Andrew Wilder, with lighting designer Christopher Rynne), than her mother’s dreams are shattered in the glass of Kristallnacht. Jura’s father is humiliated and forced to clean the streets, but there is a chance for just one of his girls to escape on the Kindertransport. The terrible choice must be made and falls on the young pianist.

Jura’s own evocations of her life, lovingly painted for her daughter as they sat together at the piano must have been extraordinarily vivid and reinforced by constant retelling too, for Golabek’s own retelling is spellbinding, tracing her mother’s journey across Europe, her arrival in pre-war Britain, and eventually, after a sojourn in the Sussex countryside, at the hostel in Willesden Lane, filled with other young people with similar stories.

The welcome she receives there, how she enthrals her new friends as she is drawn to play the hostel’s piano, what befalls her during the air raids and above all the kindness of strangers as well as her fellows, is the stuff from which Golabek and director/adaptor Hershey Felder mould such a rich show.

When Jura gets work in an East End garment factory, Golabek draws a striking analogy between the notes she plays on the keys of the piano and its strings, the textures of the music she weaves and the ‘music’ of the sewing machines on which she works, weaving garments at the factory.

Golabek’s musical selection is an eclectic delight, including Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Bach and many more from Jura’s classical repertoire, spiced with a couple of popular songs also dear to her mother’s heart – Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band and These Foolish Things (Eric Maschewitz and Jack Strachey).

It would be a shame to reveal all of Jura’s uplifting story, but there are delightful vignettes on the way – of Myra Hess at the piano in her famous lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery during and after the Blitz; of ‘our brave boys’ at rest and play in the piano bar where she gets to play for her living, to save her fingers from being ruined at those machines; and of the folk she meets in war-torn, bombed out London, her co-workers at the factory and her peers at the hostel all showing solidarity with the young pianist and rooting for her as she triumphs at last.

There is of course romance too, but again it would be telling to reveal the story of how Jura meets the man who will be the father of the children to whom she will one day pass on her talent and her love of music and her story.

So see – and hear – this beautiful, heart-warming show for yourself. It is especially poignant that it plays here through the week of Holocaust Memorial Day; and not surprising to hear that it has sold out for months in New York and toured the USA too, where Golabek educates young people about the Holocaust with a film, as well as this theatre piece based on her book The Children of Willesden Lane.

By Judi Herman

The Pianist of Willesden Lane runs until Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £22.50-£40, at St James Theatre, 12 Palace St, SW1E 5JA; 0844 264 2140. www.stjamestheatre.co.uk

Watch a brief extract from the show below:

To find out more about all the projects in which Mona Golabek and her family are involved, including the documentaries, I am a Pianist and Finding Lea Tickotsky, and the book The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport – A Memoir of Music, Love and Survival by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen, visit holdontoyourmusic.org.

Back from Limmud 2015

Limmud-logo

Limmud never ceases to amaze and hearten. In spite of being transposed this year to a Birmingham Hilton, the spirit remains, as do the hierarchy-breaking conventions, eg all name badges equal, no Lord, Rabbi or other title allowed. People of all ages at erudite lectures as well as comedy and contemporary music shows – and happy to tell you about their experiences at dinner. Again the huge task of looking after 2,500 delegates was undertaken by a fresh team of volunteers (those working on the shuk where our stand was located were particularly delightful). Why was it in Britain that this incredible, now world-wide, phenomenon was founded, I wondered. Perhaps renowned British ‘amateurism’ gave more faith that teams of volunteers could be trusted to get things right. Anyway, it is certainly something British Jewry has to be proud of – and we were proud that one subscriber there described JR as “Limmud on paper”.

We were happy to meet many of you at Conference. Our badge worked well in bringing people to our stand. We had a record day in terms of new subscriptions. So thank you to the 50 who wore one and if you can keep it and wear it at other relevant occasions (Jewish Book Week, Limmud Days, synagogue functions, etc) it would help us enormously. There are still a lot of people who don’t know we exist.

Janet Levin

Review: Nutcracker! The Musical ★★★ – Judi Herman has fun at a new seasonal show based on a familiar tale

Christmas time and it must be time for The Nutcracker, although Tchaikovsky’s ballet based on an adaptation of ETA Hoffmann's story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by Alexandra Dumas père called The Tale of the Nutcracker, only enjoyed this success from the late 1960’s onwards. The music is now so well-known that it’s not surprising Nancy Holson, no slouch when it comes to taking on big imaginative projects (last year she and her daughter staged JFest, a Festival of new Jewish Theatre, in New York ) wanted to put words to it and turn it into a musical. The London production, directed by Ollie Fielding, follows a tryout production in upstate New York.

Clara, a young girl, creeps downstairs on Christmas Eve to play with her favourite present – a Nutcracker. But a mysterious magician, Drosselmeyer, is waiting to sweep her off on a magical adventure. Tchaikovsky’s libretto was written by Marius Petipa, who helped choreograph the first production, and so he filleted the storyline to produce the ballet sequences we know and love.

Holson has given the story a present-day wrap. Young Marie’s Uncle Drosselmier (Marie Coyne and Kris Webb) read the ‘The Tale of the Hard Nut’ in the book her brings her for Christmas, so that the youngster can let her imagination take flight and enter the world of the book – actually transforming from Doctor’s daughter to the Princess Pirlipat (at least the adult Princess, for in Act One she is still a baby), daughter of Queen Wanda and King Wilhelm (aka her parents, for Ann Marcuson, who plays her mother, harassed doctor Stahlbaum, plays the Queen and Henry Wryley-Birch, who plays her father Mr S, plays the King).

All of the above clearly have a lot of fun with their characters, especially when they enter the world of the storybook. Designer Eleanor Field gives them attractively flamboyant fairy-tale costumes, which contrast nicely with the more prosaic onesies and track suits of the real world and she clearly relishes the fun of designing the set of a pop up storybook.

One of the characters having the most fun is the villainous Mouseyrinks, Queen (not King please note!) of the mice and rats that overrun the palace as in the ballet’s story. Jamie Birkett plays her with evil panache and it’s a possibly coincidental bonus that she resembles Marcuson’s Queen, almost as if she is her evil sister. In a sort of mash up with The Sleeping Beauty, when Mouseyrinks’ children are decimated at the monarch’s orders, she manages to slip past the nursemaids and guards watching over the princess to curse her – and so the quest for a way to reverse the curse, which will require bravery and lead to adventure and perhaps true love, begins … and oh yes, of course there is a Sugar Plum Fairy to play her part in righting wrongs and trying to ensure that happy ending!

Holson has a ball writing lyrics for Tchaikovsky’s glorious music and if you know the ballet, you’ll have fun identifying the tunes of the dances she transforms into songs to tell the story and move the action along. The whole cast sings with relish and dances attractively (thanks to musical director Robert Hazle and choreographer Alejandro Postigo). Occasionally it’s hard to hear the lyrics, but mostly they are greeted with appreciative audience laughter as appropriate. And it’s a brave choice to opt for not amplifying the cast, which is helped by the pre-recorded music kept at a fairly low level, though perhaps hindered by the theatre’s acoustic.

Leigh Rhianon Coggins makes a lovely warm Sugar Plum Fairy, and her voice and those of Marcuson, Coyne and Birkett stand out. The whole company works nicely together in a range of roles from palace servants to boisterously evil mice. There’s a lovely little cameo wise owl, courtesy of performer Helen Reuben and puppet maker Emily Bestow. And a great running joke where king Wilhelm blows his own trumpet to herald royal proclamations – until the Queen decides it’s her turn (yes, both performers can blow their horns!)

It is uneven and not every tune lends itself to lyrics, but it is all good fun and provides a bit of seasonal magic. Holson’s takeaway message to the audience is ‘don’t neglect your imagination’ and she and her company certainly do their best to help it to take flight.

By Judi Herman

Nutcracker! The Musical runs until Sunday 3 January, 7.30pm & 4pm, £12 at Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Rd, N7 9EF; 020 7609 1800. www.pleasance.co.uk

Review: Queen Anne ★★★★ – Judi Herman doffs her cap to the team that brings to life the reign of a little-known queen and her most influential courtiers

The British do love plays about their monarchs, especially when they show the Royals as real people and when there are resonances for now in the politics of the time. Helen Edmundson’s new play, Queen Anne, is a fine addition to the canon, exploring the reign of a Queen, perhaps known best for the furniture style named after her – and even that was after her death.

Queen Anne was the second daughter of James II. She came to the throne in 1702 after the death of her elder sister Mary, joint Monarch with William of Orange, Anne having been designated as their successor. Despite seventeen pregnancies by her husband, Prince George of Denmark, only one son survived infancy and he died aged just 11, so Anne died without any surviving children and was the last monarch of the House of Stuart. The Act of Union between England and Scotland was signed during her reign and Marlborough’s army defeated the French and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim.

Edmundson’s device here is to reflect events through the extraordinarily passionate friendship of Anne (Emma Cunliffe) with the formidable Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Natascha McElhone), a powerful friend and a dangerous enemy to everyone, including the Queen.

Edmundson also manages to make the power politics in a Protestant England at war with Catholic France entirely clear and fascinating and it paints a lively portrait of England’s power couple Sarah and her husband, that great general the Duke of Marlborough, (Robert Cavanah), who get to build the huge and grandiose Blenheim Palace as a reward for his victory at the eponymous battle.

Inevitably, there’s a lot of exposition, especially in the first scenes of the play. Happily Edmundson hits on the idea of bringing this to life with witty, well-realised set pieces using the scabrous satire of the pamphlets, prints and songs of the period. They’re presented here by a sparky Daniel Defoe (Carl Prekopp) and an urbane and worldly-wise Jonathan Swift (Tom Turner). A cruelly grotesque ‘Queen Anne’ padded out to look heavily pregnant, recalls the puppets in Spitting Image and pamphlets and broadsheet ballads shower the stage with paper, eagerly gathered by the public and so providing a useful, eye-opening parallel with the spread of stories by 20th century mass media and going viral in the age of the internet.

The play is at its best when exploring the consequences of’ ‘Mrs Morgan’s’ fervent, consuming and part-requited love of ‘Mrs Freeman’, as Anne and Sarah did in fact call each other; and the rising of the star of a new lady in waiting in the monarch’s life, the ambitious but genuinely caring Abigail Hill, later Masham (displaying ferocious intelligence and determination in Beth Parker’s quietly vivid performance), at the expense of the almost recklessly over-ambitious Sarah.

Emma Cunliffe give a fine portrait of a Queen disillusioned by events, yet eventually strengthened by the regal authority she needs to lead the nation. Edmundson writes a wonderfully lusty Sarah, in love with life, power - and her husband John Churchill; and Natascha McElhone realizes her wonderfully, splendid in her overweening self-belief and belief in the power she has over Anne. It’s really no surprise when she overreaches herself and the Queen’s stony rejection of her bewildered and angry erstwhile favourite is a powerful climax for both women. There’s strong support from Jonathan Broadbent as the politically astute Tory Robert Harley and from Richard Hope as Lord Chancellor Godolphin, bent on intrigue and in league with the Duke of Marlborough, a robust Robert Cavanah.

Director Natalie Abrahami orchestrates the private and the public to give satisfying light and shade and never lets the action drop into cod restoration comedy, even in those scurrilous ‘supper club’ scenes. And Hannah Clark’s design incorporates a simple truck four-poster bed that keeps the stage clear for action, so matters move along as fast as the exposition will allow. The authentic period costumes are attractively set off by elaborate hairstyles for the women and periwigs for the men that make you see why men affected them and what women might have seen in them. Edmundson’s play is a fascinating study of the power of love and the love of power and a delightfully lively and engrossing way to get to understand a monarch at such a turning point in our Island story.

By Judi Herman

Queen Anne continues runs until Saturday 23 January, 7.30pm & 1.30pm, £16-£37 at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 7LS; 0844 800 1110. www.rsc.org.uk

Review: The Homecoming ★★★★ – Judi Herman is drawn in by the vile power of Pinter

I saw the original production of Harold Pinter’s dark, multi-award-winning comedy as a precocious, theatre-mad teenager. I wouldn't have been allowed near it if it had been a film, it would have been x-rated in those days for sure! The homecoming of the title is the return to the flinty bosom of his East End family of Teddy, a college lecturer Stateside with a murky past in this all-male household ruled over by retired butcher Max. Teddy brings home the, er, "bacon" in the alluring shape of Ruth, his wife of five years. The power play between the brothers, their father and above all between Ruth and her in-laws is the meat of the play. I particularly remember Ian Holm, sinister and dangerous as Lenny the pimp; and Vivien Merchant, Pinter’s first wife, who created the role of Ruth, and the way she crossed her legs causing shock waves to ripple through the theatre – and I don't mean because of the static in her nylons…

Gemma Chan makes the role of Ruth her own in Jamie Lloyd’s spare and scabrously funny production. She has extraordinarily precise body language, at once apparently passive, exposed, vulnerable even, and yet enigmatic – you wonder what is running through her mind as she takes a lone night stroll outside her husband’s family home. You wait uncomfortably for a reaction when she meets these unlovable foul-mouthed Londoners (Max habitually refers to all women, including his late wife, as bitches and worse), enduring their bullying and menacing in apparently dignified silence. Then there is that pivotal see-saw moment where the power shifts. It is suddenly obvious that Ruth has the measure of John Simm’s predatory Lenny. In her hands, the glass of water Pinter gives her as a bargaining chip turns not into wine, but a dangerous, potential aphrodisiac.

Although there are scenes when director Jamie Lloyd (who worked with Pinter himself on productions of his plays) brilliantly fields the whole dysfunctional family, it’s the tussles in those duologues, precisely calibrated by both actors and director, that are the guilty pleasures for me. Every family member is on the take, using and abusing each other is second nature and the language is shocking and brutal, but it’s the way this family communicates and it’s almost as if the care they take to choose their epithets is the way they show they care.

John Simm and Ron Cook open the play with cross-generational sparring that sets the tone and they create a magnificently vile father and son relationship. Cook is all ineffectual, bullying bluster and Simm is immediately silky and menacing – a terrific exponent of Pinter. Gary Kemp’s Teddy is a fine study in disintegration from lofty academic to his old place low in the pecking order in this disreputable band of brothers. Keith Allen’s Sam, a chauffeur by trade, intimates why he might be a bachelor, though this can never be articulated in this testosterone-fuelled household, where youngest brother Joey is a failing boxer (effectively ineffectual in John Macmillan’s almost touching performance). This starry ensemble cast works together wonderfully to create Pinter’s claustrophobic world on Soutra Gilmour’s clever set – a sparsely furnished room dominated by Dad’s ancient armchair. Lighting designer Richard Howell transforms the realism into what looks a terrifying 3D projection that traps the characters in a blood red frame, to sound designer George Dennis’ perfect, brash soundtrack.

Pinter would have been proud of his amanuensis!

By Judi Herman

'The Homecoming' runs until 13 February 2016, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £29.50-£69.50, at Trafalgar Studios, 14 Whitehall, SW1A 2DY; 0844 871 7632. www.atgtickets.com

Review: JeruZalem – "A zombie frightfest complete with Biblical quotes"

The Paz brothers (Doron and Yoav) bring zombies to Jerusalem in an original film that may well scare you – if you don’t feel too nauseous viewing a wildly wobbling Old City of Jerusalem through the Google Glass Jewish American Princess heroine Sarah wears, a gift from her Dad to take on her first trip to Israel.

This may be a zombie frightfest complete with Biblical quotes, but if you’re familiar with Dracula and other vampire movies, you’ll recognise elements here – the handsome young man who falls in with the two female buddies, the fatal decision to stay in a spooked Holy City (think ‘let’s take the shortcut through the graveyard at nightfall – what harm can it do?’) the flightier of the two falling victim first and scenes in an asylum designed to scare the viewer witless too, if you’re not already thoroughly spooked by winged zombies and violent exorcisms.

The girls are as fun-loving and careless as you could wish, so it never really looks as if it will end well for either of them, but don’t let that put anyone off visiting the Holy City – and seeking out the extraordinary alleys, tunnels and walkways where the film is so lovingly shot.

By Judi Herman

JeruZalem screens Wednesday 18 November, 9.15pm, Odeon Swiss Cottage, 96 Finchley Rd, NW3 5EL; 0333 006 7777. www.odeon.co.uk

Kapunka – small but perfectly proportioned at only 12 minutes

The tale of crafty Shmulik – who sees his way round the rabbinate law of shmita that decrees land be left fallow every seven years – is timely for this is that seventh year. Shmulik’s solution to sell his land temporarily to Changrong, his senior Thai worker, with the idea of buying it back when the year is up, inevitably goes spectacularly wrong. And I do mean spectacularly! To reveal more would be a shame, but director Tal Greenberg’s abrasively funny film may well remain a unique opportunity to marvel at a Thai temple sprouting in an Israeli field like Jack’s beanstalk. Greenberg’s cinematography is gorgeous, colouring a vivid landscape, the Spaghetti Western score is spot on for a comic confrontation on the land and the actors are wonderfully matched. It’s great to see the significant community of Thai workers in Israel given space too. Greenberg is definitely one to watch. By Judi Herman

Kapunka is screened with What's in a Name in London on the following dates:

Wednesday 11 November 6.30pm, Odeon Swiss Cottage, 96 Finchley Rd, NW3 5EL; 033 3006 7777. 6.45pm, JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8988 (as part of an evening of comic shorts). 8.30pm, Odeon South Woodford, 60-64 High Rd, E18 2QL; 087 1224 4007.

Saturday 14 November 6.45pm, JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8988.

Find further info at www.ukjewishfilm.org

Hill Start - Judi Herman reviews a fine tragicomedy from Israel showing at the UK Jewish Film Festival

It's no wonder this engrossing tragicomedy has been a box-office comic sensation in Israel says Judi Herman

What will you make of the Geva family – Jerusalem’s finest? Father and son, who work together at the sharp end of cosmetic surgery, make their first appearance intently drawing lines on the naked flesh of their next client – a young woman who looks pretty shapely already. There is some professional disagreement and it’s soon clear that father Micha (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is pulling rank on son Ari (Itay Tiran) when it comes to enhancing those curves against his better judgement. Ari knows his own mind when it comes to his chosen bride, mouthy private detective Reli (Romi Aboulafia), despite Micha’s disapproval and the consternation of the women in his family. His mother Ora (Idit Teperson) is a super-fit gym teacher and half-marathon winner, and  sister Shlomit (Mali Levi Gershon) teaches Arabic in schools, using the romantic films of her crooner idol Ahmed as a teaching aid and setting writing the diary of a Palestinian schoolchild as a homework assignment.

There may be a touch of social snobbism about the Gevas – Reli is from the Sephardi community – but there’s no doubt that alcohol makes her behaviour pretty challenging. The trouble is that she and Ari drink more than a few premature toasts on their wedding day before the ceremony, and Reli's inability to hold her drink sets off a chain of events that means Ari never gets to break a glass under the wedding canopy that day. The only glass that smashes is the windscreen of Micha’s car as he has a terrible accident driving the whole family to the ceremony.

It’s the rebuilding of bodies, dreams and lives shattered that day in unexpected ways that is the meat of this unusual, quirky tragicomedy. I’d say "you couldn’t make it up", but writer and director Oren Stern and his co-writer Riki Shulman have, of course, done exactly that!

Ora loses the most, for she is left in a coma, unaware that she is surrounded by her  family, who take to meeting for meals at her bedside. Despite Micha’s fury, Ari has to try to find the courage to stick to Reli and reschedule the wedding lest he lose her. Micha himself has to find the courage to get back behind the wheel and retake his driving test or face a life-long driving ban. Thanks to a chance meeting with a pretty driving instructor who moonlights as a yoga instructor (Romi Aboulafia) this apparently insensitive man (he can’t help pointing out physical flaws with a practised plastic surgeon’s eye) learns some valuable life lessons.

Shlomit gets to meet not one, but two potential significant others, thanks to her decision to run the next half marathon through Jerusalem’s streets in honour of her mother. She trains with Motti, the wheelchair-using gym teacher who replaces Ora; and finds the bed next to her occupied by the mother of matinee idol Ahmed, who's played with relish by real-life Arab star Yousef (Joe) Sweid.

Will Ora wake from her coma? Will Shlomit follow in her mother’s springy footsteps and win the marathon? Will she find love with Motti or Ahmed? Will Ari find his courage so that Reli can get her man in the end? And will self-centred Micha learn to centre himself? You’ll have to see this funny, sometimes abrasive film to find out. And if you do, you’ll enjoy some wonderfully rounded comic performances from some of Israel’s top acting talent and find out why it’s done so well at festivals around the world.

By Judi Herman

Hill Start screens in London on Saturday 14 November. 9.15pm. JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8988.

Then moves to Didsbury on Sunday 15 November. 6.30pm. Cineworld, M20 5PG; 087 1200 2000.

Leeds on Sunday 15 November. 4pm. MAZCC, LS17 6AZ; 011 3268 4211.

Glasgow on Tuesday 17 November. 7.30pm. CCA, G2 3JD; 014 1352 4900.

South Woodford on Saturday 21 November. 7pm. Odeon, E18 2QL; 087 1224 4007.

Find further info at www.ukjewishfilm.org