Listen… We know we’re irritating, which is half the point. But not the main thing… An Eruv no one’s seen before… You think it’s insolent and flip. What if it has to be that way to open your eyes?
I have to mention the lighting design because as this
play reaches its surreal conclusion, Jonathan Chan’s lighting mixes with
multiple coloured strands of thread to create the impression that we’re all
suspended high above ground fighting alongside the three women in this play to
maintain the higher ground and a unity of purpose that transcends the lines
that normally have us bound. Maybe it was the interval can of pale ale, but it
was a lofty feeling indeed and fully matched the elevated poetic prose that
infuses Misha Levkov’s first play.
Kicking of the year for Jermyn Street’s Promise Season, In the Net is wordy, erudite and quite hard to pin down until the closing. It’s a play grounded in the seeming inevitability of a near future in which the horrific rhetoric of the current Government who talk of swarms of refugees and controlling our borders in order to prevent an invasion. Wars driven by a shifting world order, contested energy resources and an accelerating climate catastrophe, could within the space of two years leave us in the same position as those in this play…
Levkov’s London is sweltering under an unprecedented heat with water rationing par for the course as an increasingly authoritarian state regulates daily life in 2025. We find two half-sisters, the older Anna (Anya Murphy), fresh from a Buddhist retreat – going back to the World - already accepting beyond her years, and her younger sibling, Laura (Carlie Diamond, surprisingly in only her first professional role) who is forthright, restless and angry. Her biological mother… their mother, has just died and Laura is externalising her response. Their father, Harry, aka Papa (Hywell Simons) is confused by his daughters and intent on an escape fantasy involving Eastbourne; whilst the women want to confront reality in their own way.
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| Anya Murphy and Carlie Diamond (All photography by Steve Gregson) |
Their mother helped to rescue a Syrian refugee, Hala
(Suzanne Ahmet) who holds a highly intelligent mirror up to this mix of
heartfelt but slightly unworldly North London sensibilities. She grounds the
play, her lived experience far beyond the well-intentioned family, her teenage
son left behind and forces of the Immigration services probing for any reason
to restrict her movement. Tony Bell plays the sinister Immigration Officer with
escalating menace, his unusual vocabulary belying the delight with which he
bullies and threatens… every authoritarian state needs men like him. Mt Bell is
also the bumbling, Councillor (Acting Deputy Chair), seemingly good humoured
but stickler for the cruelty of rules.
Whilst the Officer is concerned with immigration, the Councillor is just obsessed with regulation and Laura’s plan to establish and area of peaceful co-operation, a Jewish Eruv, a sanctuary demarcated by a network of coloured threads bound from the highest branches of the trees in their garden across the whole neighbourhood, under which everyone will be free to do what they need to help those within*. Laura takes her idea to the local council were other jews object to this ancient idea, possibly concerned about the impact on their reputation at this delicate time.
It is an idea that is wistful and Laura is indulged and gently challenged by bother Anna and Hala, the latter seeing a lot of herself in the younger woman even as she relates much better to her sister. Laura takes offence when Hala and her Muslim friends start to string out their own Eruv in solidarity; like the child she can still be Laura cannot accept this bending of the strict rules of the Eruv and yet, as with so many situations, the women seem able to reach an almost unspoken agreement and even without specific words being used their communication transcends the situation.
This is true of the whole narrative, as all the men come and go, threaten, misunderstand, try to reason and yet, in the end, the three will act as one, connected to the higher emotional environment within the net. Even Papa Harry doesn’t get it, perhaps he’s too used to masking his fears through actions and decision making.
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| Anya Murphy and Hywell Simons (Photography by Steve Gregson) |
You’re the best loved, dead-tired practical father. Who spawned Eruv children who can’t stop now. But practical’s not enough. It doesn’t catch the vision…
The vision provided by this play is truly a promising one and In the Net is a philosophical triumph, forcing its audience to engage with the triumvirate in ways they wouldn’t have expected during the last Teams meeting of the day. Vicky Moran directs her players very well, and they move with emotional precision around the fixed space of the JST, ultimately flowing in gentle co-ordination across the upside of the thread, moving with each other as if the threads were hardly there. So powerful and so puzzling… but also funny, delicate and quietly terrifying. There’s a future here.
The cast are assured and energetic, none more so that Carlie Diamond on her debut and her forthright delivery eats through a wordy script as naturally as breathing, her words absorbed by Anya Murphy, the two presenting as not just half sisters but whole ones too. Suzanne Ahmet also does well as the play's most grounded and likeable character, refusing well-intentioned help as she tries to forge a new legitimacy in this hostile environment.
Props to the movement director Nadia Sohawon, as well as the set and costume design of Ingrid Hu and Daniel Denton’s projection work in support of the aforementioned Jonathan Chan’s lighting. Combined with Matt Eaton’s sound, you are transported and I hadn’t expected to be so caught up… climbing the stairs back onto the streets with strings of thought drifting behind me.
And all this on a long working Tuesday… ****
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| Suzanne Ahmet and Tony Bell (Photography by Steve Gregson) |
In the Net runs until 4th February and is well worth your time, a promising new playwright with something spirited to say and, as I travel home, I know I’ll be thinking about this for days.
Full details and booking at the JST website.
*Wikiparently an Eruv “is a ritual halakhic enclosure
made for the purpose of allowing activities which are normally prohibited on
Shabbat, specifically: carrying objects from a private domain to a semi-public
domain, and transporting objects four cubits or more within a semi-public
domain.”
