Writer: Sam Grabiner
Director: James Macdonald
There is a real mood at the moment for theatre to engage with events in Gaza, and to really interrogate the events leading up to, and during, the Israeli military force’s relentless attacks that have resulted in wholesale humanitarian catastrophe. Christmas Day likes to think it examines a London Jewish family’s disparate views of Israel, Gaza, and even their faith’s cultural history. Unfortunately, any insight is buried under a morass of self-congratulatory weirdness.
Siblings Noah and Tamara (Samuel Blenkin and Bel Powley) live in an abandoned warehouse-office complex with ten others, most of whom have left for the Christmas holiday. They are joined by their father, Nigel Lindsay’s Elliot, Noah’s girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke), and Noah’s childhood friend Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who is back visiting England after having moved to Tel Aviv.
The distressed nature of Miriam Buether’s set feels authentic, supplemented by some stellar sound design from Max Pappenheim. Rumbles of the Tube trains beneath their feet, or the ominous clanking of the heater that teeters precariously from an overhead gantry, afford the play a sense of space that is unusual, yet grounded.
If only the characters and dialogue could match. Sam Grabiner’s script starts so self-consciously trying to craft comedy punchlines and all-around kookiness that it forgets to ground any of the characters in anything resembling reality. Lindsay is best at morphing his character’s lines into something more closely resembling the humour to which Grabiner is clearly aiming, but most of the time, everybody seems to be trying too hard to craft a darkly Ayckbourn-like comedy rather than actually giving the characters any sense of genuine depth.
The closest the play comes to an authentic interaction between the siblings is when a particularly banal trivia game turns Noah and Tamara into freakishly competitive animals. Most of the time, though, Powley is reduced to angrily shouting as she tries to connect with the cultural pain felt by the Jewish diaspora to the consternated bemusement of the others.
There is shouting from the others, too, most notably from Lindsay as he rails against what he feels is Powley’s simplistic attitude to the war in Gaza. Sadly, while repeatedly barking, “It’s ours! It’s ours!” may convey the attitude some Israelis have, the intransigence of all parties onstage does little to engage with or illuminate anything of note.
One could be charitable and attribute a deeper symbolic meaning to some of Grabiner’s more outré embellishments. Perhaps the warehouse in which Noah and Tamara live, their residence being part of a guardianship agreement, is supposed to represent Israel, the Tube tumblings and malfunctioning heaters forever threatening some form of destruction. Maybe the spaced-out flatmate, Wren (Jamie Ankrah), carries a deeper and more meaningful resonance than just being a comedy-horror relief.
Or maybe it’s just a vast number of ideas being thrown on stage without much of a plan. It certainly feels like it. Some of the characters may, by the end of the play, act as if they have learned something deep and meaningful, but there’s no evidence offered to the audience of what that might be or where it came from.
Perhaps only one thing is clear. However one spends one’s December 25th in real life, it is unlikely to be as tediously, face-clawingly irritating as Christmas Day.
Continues until 8 January 2026
