What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

A superb drama. Nathan Englander’s wild, enthralling play began life as a New Yorker short story rendered in pastel shades. It’s a fine piece of writing, but the American author and his director, Patrick Marber, have turned it into something jagged and raw and uproariously funny. If you can imagine a script that combines the bruising anger of David Mamet and the wit of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, you’ll have some idea of how raucous a piece of theatre this is.

No other current London stage play engages with present-day global politics as much as this one. That Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank manages to feel so relevant, alive, and even-handed as it filters thorny themes and controversial viewpoints through the genre of comedy of manners, in this instance incredibly bad ones, is cause for celebration . . . It’s the sort of play you’ll be thinking and talking about after the final curtain, and theatre to provoke the conversations we need to be having right now.

Explosive and intelligent . . . Riveting in its arguments, simultaneously an up-to-the-minute political drama and a musing on how to own and honour an inherited religious identity, regardless of your faith. While not the entire focus, it bravely, exhilaratingly confronts knotty politics.

Englander thoughtfully develops his scenario, probing the characters’ backstories . . . tautly dramatic.

Deeply personal and strangely purifying, and if Englander leaves us with no answers he has perhaps moved the needle on an urgent dialogue.

Dense, talkative, witty, thoughtful . . . For all the pain it’s a bracingly funny, moving and well-constructed play.