Jeremy Corbyn’s tumultuous reign as the left-wing leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 caused palpitations in much of British Jewry.
On the other hand Nick Cassenbaum’s delightfully scabrous satire about a “ragtag yiddisher plot” to kidnap him is a joyfully surreal response.
In Emma Jude Harris’s dynamic two-hander, Dylan Corbett-Bader and Gemma Barnett play the twins Dan and Lauren. The motley array of other larger-than-life Jewish characters disport themselves through Barkingside in northeast London and Canning Town in east London in pursuit of their reviled prey.
Corbett-Bader, 27, is fabulous as the hunched-shouldered Malcolm Spivak, a Cockney ex-gangster with a manic glint in his eye. The twins meet him at the funeral (aka levoyah) of their late Poppa Lenny and he is the fulcrum for much of the madcap action.
He morphs dexterously into the cocksure, libidinous Joshua from West Hampstead as well as a “Nazi” boilerman and members of the Mossad, MI5 and CIA spy agencies, among others.
Barnett, 30, for her part, is divinely on the ball as the paranoid Nana Sandra, surrounded by an imagined semi-circle of family portraits in her bereaved Barkingside abode. She mutates with aplomb into Moishy, the plucky, diminutive 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, Sonya, the tub-thumping Liberal rabbi, and Sara, the ultra-Orthodox landlord who owns half of Stamford Hill in north London.
It’s superbly scripted, with (often helpfully onomatopoeic) yiddish words chucked with relish into the dramatic pot by the mordantly witty pen of Cassenbaum. And the compact setting of the lecture theatre helps to amplify the anxieties and neuroses of the deliciously sent-up denizens of claustrophobia central.
For, while not diminishing the vital input of its central gentile character, its potency stems from the fearless lampoonery of its Jewish characters by the effervescent Jewish duo.
Summerhall, Anatomy lecture theatre, until 26 August
