Christmas Day review, Almeida: Alternative festive play lands like an ice-cold snowball to the neck

In a season of cosy Christmas fare, Almeida’s alternative festive programming choice lands like an ice-cold snowball to the neck. Sam Grabiner’s jolting, unfinished-feeling play is full of uncomfortable truths about family, guilt, and Jewish identity. It follows a father who’s dropped in to visit his two adult kids and their (ex) partners in their dilapidated guardianship property. Yes, it’s the 25th of December. The Christmas tree is lit. But there’s no twinkly eyed nostalgia here – just an awkward, prickly clan eating Chinese food and trying to work out what (if anything) this weird old get-together means to them.

Nigel Lindsay makes smooth work of the role of the compulsively talkative Dad, who can’t encounter anything without sharing a lengthy opinion on it. To him, the tree is an aberration. “It’s perverted,” he says, in a comedic opening tirade that associates wanton pine-decorating with sex, drugs and general seediness. This beginning is Grabiner’s way of marking out this family and its rituals from the omnipresent Christian-influenced mainstream: the characters have a lore of their own, centring on ancient stories that they each share, making opaque links between religious tradition and the current state of affairs.

As daughter Tamara, Bel Powley is intense and insistent, determined to claim solidarity with other diasporas across the world, and to make her family see the images from Gaza that haunt her. She finds beauty in a centuries-old tradition of exile status. But her ex-boyfriend Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) feels differently. He tells stories of finding a new sense of belonging on an Israeli beach, waxing lyrical about the beauty of tanned bodies on white sand. Tamara’s diffident brother Noah (Samuel Blenkin) shies away from these polar opposites, offering an opaque meditation on an old ritual whose details have been lost, while its magic lives on.

Grabiner’s thinking on Jewish mysticism is enthralling – and there’s something satisfyingly thought-provoking about the way he gives the audience space to interpret these ancient tales. What’s less satisfying about this play is how incomplete it feels. It’s got all the ingredients of a theatrical staple: the family drama where old secrets emerge over the dinner table. But Grabiner’s approach is more opaque: he lets massive revelations drop without really acknowledging them, fills his story with strange red herrings, and finishes with an odd, symbolic, ritualistic scene that you’d probably need a panel of debating religious authorities to really get to the bottom of.

James Macdonald’s naturalistic production is effective in giving this potentially meandering story a sense of real danger. Designer Miriam Buether has lavished an impressive amount of love and detail on this horrible setting, creating a falling-apart 1960s office that actively seems to hate the people who are trying to live in it. A lethal-looking, glowing electric heater looms over the heads of the dining family, erupting at odd moments and baking them all into a sweaty frenzy. They’re unsafe and uncomfortable, an implicit reference to millennia of persecution.

Only that legacy of persecution isn’t simple, here. Grabiner seems keen to interrogate ideas of victimhood, to dismantle the origin stories people build their identities around, but ultimately his reluctance to really dig into the themes he raises ends up feeling unsatisfying. His play is stuffed with interesting thinking and intense images that evoke the discomfort of being Jewish as the horrors of Gaza unfold – but it doesn’t feel like the final draft.

On at the Almeida until 8 January