The sweatshop guide to Jewish folk, warts and all
Filthy Business Hampstead Theatre
There are tough old boots, and then there’s Yetta Solomon, the take-no-prisoners, suffer-nofools Jewish matriarch at the heart of Ryan Craig’s hugely ambitious, at times greatly entertaining, but ultimately too sprawling family drama.
It’s set in a north London rubbermerchants, as viewed first and foremost at the end of the Sixties and then, towards close of play, in the early Thatcherite Eighties. Yetta – Sara Kestelman giving one of the performances of the year, and her career too – is the refugee who survived the unsurvivable then toiled in sweatshops as she made her way from scratch. Nothing escapes her ready wit and often foul mouth, but that’s because she has stared death in the face. “When dem bastard Kossacks came to my village I fought back,” she says. “Dey set dogs on us. I barked back. I barked louder.” It gets a laugh, as Kestelman stands there, clenched, indomitable, and her fighting-spirit flies a topical flag too: she sees herself as a Brit to the bones.
Craig knows this milieu – the shop is based on “the one my dad worked in with his extended family”, we’re told. Filthy Business could be his finest play to date, the making of him, but it sorely needs some of the ruthlessness that Yetta has in abundance.
It starts off tight, piles on the plot, then meanders across three acts and loses focus, and at points, with one misjudged behind-the-counter sex-act in particular, doesn’t know its farce from its elbow.
There’s a wonderful bit of scenesetting early on when Yetta fields a customer phone-call. She goes on the offensive: “Do we do cushions? What are you, a moron?” She ups the ante further, as a crafty prelude to a placatory and phoney “one-time-only deal”.
I yearned, not least on the grounds of retail plausibility, for more interactions with clientele, and less internecine strife. There’s much ado about some missing money and a mysterious arson attack that looks anti-Semitic at first but then has the air of an inside job.
Explosive male tempers are to the fore – first with sibling rivalry between Yetta’s sons Nat and Leo (their wives thrown into the volatile mix too), then between their boys, Gerard and Mickey, who trade blows as the partnership comes unstuck. At moments, I felt as if I was trapped in the airless, stock-crammed cellar with poor put-upon Monty Minsky; the core concerns need more oxygen.
All that said, this is valiant and valuable, daring to show Jewish folk on the make, warts and all, even if the second-half tie-in with Eighties entrepreneurialism adds little. Edward Hall directs with his customary élan, while the two-tier set is lovingly realised by Ashley Martin-Davis. Among a strong supporting cast, there’s glinting promise from Callum Woodhouse as sweetly mild Mickey and Babirye Bukilwa as Rosa, the underling who clambers, like Kestelman’s glowering Yetta, to the top of the pile.
Until April 22. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com