The Holy Rosenbergs Review: A Fiercely Intelligent Family Drama at the Menier Chocolate Factory

Ryan Craig's The Holy Rosenbergs, running at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 2 May 2026, is the kind of play that makes you grateful for small theatre spaces. In a room where you can see every flicker of doubt cross an actor's face, this fiercely intelligent family drama builds quietly and then detonates. It is gripping, urgent, and deeply humane, and it deserves the attention of anyone who cares about new writing in London.

A Family Under Pressure

The setting is a Jewish household in 2009, in the aftermath of the Gaza war. Ruth Rosenberg, played with intelligence and emotional precision by Dorothea Myer-Bennett, has been investigating her brother Danny's death while working with the UN on war crimes documentation. Her findings threaten to fracture her family along lines that have been papered over for years.

Craig's great achievement is making the political personal without ever reducing it to polemic. The arguments about international law and national loyalty arrive between mouthfuls of marble cake, nestled among sibling rivalries, parental anxieties, and the ordinary domestic rhythms that hold families together even when everything else is pulling them apart. Tim Shortall's set, built around an extendable dining table and period furnishings, grounds every ideological confrontation in the physical reality of a home.

Nicholas Woodeson's Layered Patriarch

Nicholas Woodeson delivers a wonderfully layered performance as David Rosenberg, the family patriarch. He moves between bluster, fury, and something much more fragile with a fluency that makes the character feel lived-in rather than written. There is a subtle deterioration running through his performance across the evening, moments where his authority slips and something darker surfaces. Woodeson handles these shifts with the kind of ambiguity that stays with you long after the curtain.

Tracy-Ann Oberman Grounds the Evening

Tracy-Ann Oberman is excellent as Lesley, David's wife, who expresses her grief and anxiety through the language of hospitality, through baking and tidying and making sure everyone has eaten. It is a beautifully observed portrait of a woman holding a household together through sheer force of domestic will, and Oberman finds both the warmth and the sadness in Lesley's determination to keep things normal when nothing is normal at all. She generates the evening's warmest laughs, but every joke has weight beneath it.

The Ensemble Delivers

Nitai Levi brings a restless, confrontational energy to Jonny Rosenberg that contrasts effectively with Myer-Bennett's more measured Ruth. Dan Fredenburgh and Adrian Lukis round out the cast with carefully judged supporting performances, and Alex Zur brings quiet authority to the role of the Rabbi. This is an ensemble that trusts each other, and the overlapping dialogue and interrupted arguments feel genuinely spontaneous.

Why It Matters

The Holy Rosenbergs is not an easy play. It asks its audience to sit with competing moral claims and resists the temptation to resolve them neatly. But it is also frequently very funny, emotionally generous, and deeply theatrical in the way it uses the confined space of the Menier to create a sense of claustrophobic intimacy. You feel trapped in this family's living room, complicit in their arguments, unable to look away.

Craig's writing has a muscularity that recalls the best of Tom Stoppard's political plays, but with a domestic warmth that is entirely his own. The play's willingness to let its characters be contradictory, to be right and wrong at the same time, is what elevates it from issue drama to something more lasting.

Should You Book?

The Menier Chocolate Factory is a small venue and this production is generating strong word of mouth. Tickets start from £43 and the run ends on 2 May, so there is not long to catch it. If you are drawn to plays that combine sharp domestic observation with genuinely urgent political questions, The Holy Rosenbergs is one of the best things currently playing in London.

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