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Review: Revenge: After The Levoyah (The Yard Theatre)

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Review by Dan Sinclair


⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


As The Yard enters its final few shows before the big move, they’ve assembled a wild final season, opening with the Edinburgh transfer of Nick Cassenbaum’s Revenge: After The Levoyah, a show which had significant success at the festival, scooping up a Fringe First and the Lustrum Award (that weird sheep skull thing that Summerhall give out). I’ve been looking forward to catching this show for a while now, Emma Jude Harris’s last directorial project I caught, How I Learned To Swim, was one of my favourite pieces of last year. Dylan Corbett-Bader was one of the bright points of Kenneth Branagh’s… divisive King Lear, and as a resident of Corbyn’s constituency and a lover of The Yard, the stars were aligning. And I wasn’t let down. 



Lauren and Dan, two twins from Essex/London, depending on your persuasion, are at the Levoyah (funeral) of their grandfather when they are approached by an old friend of his, Malcolm Spivak. He’s a proper hardcore old-timer, he was even in a pram at Cable Street, but before he’s brown bread, like a dodo, he wants to go out with a bang - make a difference. He wants to kidnap Jeremy Corbyn. Will they help Malcolm with his plan, or will they carry on sitting shiva. What follows is a 60-minute farce, and as director/dramaturg Emma Jude-Harris puts it, one that is joyfully Anglo-Jewish.


Gemma Barnett (Lauren) and Dylan Corbett-Bader (Dan) are a formidable double act, both firing on all cylinders for the runtime of the play. It looks like an absolute workout, both are rattling off dialogue, a mountain of characters and contorting their bodies with every new character they meet. They are a joy to watch and have impeccable comedic timing, bouncing off each other for 60 minutes. Nick Cassenbaum’s script is relentless in its comedy, many will tell you that a good comedy should spread out its gags, but with Emma Jude-Harris’s direction, it feels like every 10 seconds there is another exceptional joke coming to smack you in the face. Cassenbaum’s script drifts away from razor-sharp satire, and opts instead for an absurd, hilarious and thickly applied method. Far from exhausting, it is proper funny stuff.



The ending sequence, whilst a homage to the shootout at the end of every crime movie, became difficult to follow. A product of two actors trying to portray twelve people all on stage at the same time, all talking, and all doing something, the anarchy overtook the story a bit too much. Alys Whitehead’s set transferred a fringe piece to the larger Yard wonderfully, pieces of red wire stretched across the venue, skimming your heads. Menorah’s, boxes of catnip, a toaster, the shelves were stacked with all the little details that create the lives of Lauren and Dan, the more you look, the more you know. Sound and Music from Adam Lenson and Josh Middleton respectively, helped fuel the much-needed chaos that drove the play to its suitably cool finale


The message is clear, there is no universal British Jewish stance. At the core of the play is the repeated question - Does Jeremy Corbyn hate Jews? Throughout the play, we are presented with 24 unique answers to that question, with the play’s derailment into a madcap heist sequence, featuring MI5, the CIA, Mossad, and a man boasting a tattoo of Thatcher wearing a Spurs kit, Dan’s stance is given the most weight by the end - yet one voice stuck with me. In a scene early into the play, Lauren visits Nana to see how she’s holding up post-Levoyah. Regardless of who’s to blame, what went wrong, what Corbyn really believes? Nana is terrified and won’t leave the house. She is representative of the true victim of this play. 


Revenge: After The Levoyah is playing at the Yard Theatre till 25th January.



Photos by Alex Brenner

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