What part of you is original, inherited, or pure fiction?
In its UK debut at the Marylebone Theatre, Anna Ziegler’s acclaimed The Wanderers unfurls the story of two Brooklynite marriages with mirrored dilemmas. Secular Pulitzer-winning writer Abe (Alexander Forsyth) and his wife — and fellow, albeit not nearly as successful as Abe to her great chagrin, writer — Sophie (Paksie Vernon) have known each other their entire lives. Abe’s young, idealistic, Hasidic Jewish parents Esther (Katerina Tannenbaum) and Schmuli (Eddie Toll) shyly enter marriage by duty after having met only once.
Directed by Igor Golyak, the play asks unflinchingly about what we inherit and what we betray with a bold set, fast-paced pop-culture dialogue, and paralleled timelines. While searching to represent his family’s story, Abe falls into an email correspondence with actress Julia Cheever (Anna Popplewell), a fantasy that strains his marriage. Esther seeks liberation and questions the confines of her faith and community, much to the despair of the devout Schmuli.
The past and present circle around each other. Ziegler continually breaks up the dialogue with long passages (delivered in Abe’s omnipresent writer voice) that manage to address the ambiguities that come with discerning personal failures and frustrations with greater generational, historical trauma.
Jan Pappelbaum’s set design is undoubtedly engaging, particularly when paired with Alex Musgrave’s precise and emotive handling of lighting. The stage is split in two by Plexiglass boards on which computer screens, radios, roads, even the book chapters that ground the story have to be scribbled and doodled on to become real (reminiscent of Harold with his Purple Crayon). However, in combination with snow which periodically falls on the stage, the set is in danger of overshadowing the story, hinting the plot is relying too heavily on visual gimmicks to hold the audience’s attention.
The many transitions between the two timelines do take their toll on the viewer. The Hasidic couple’s increasing tensions are detailed and sensitive to both characters’ psychological hang-ups, against the relative simplicity of the modern couple’s frustrations. The emotional charge between Esther and Schmuli is too often diluted by the affair between Abe and Julia. As Abe digs deeper into fiction, his real marriage with Sophie — and indeed, the character Sophie — is neglected. The couple’s laborious conversations can be thought-provoking but their depth is largely borrowed from the conversations their parents have lived through first-hand. Thematically, this makes perfect sense, but in execution the emotional pace becomes disjointed.
The play’s “Chapter 4: Rivka” does open up Sophie’s box, but this is left in the background to favour Abe’s family history. To summarise their relationship, he jokes that she “inherited both the Holocaust and slavery” — and she says that she does not identify with these traumas. “I don’t think I want to be any of the things that I am.” .
Alexander Forsyth is fascinating to watch as a self-absorbed writer who painstakingly takes inventory of his parent’s marriage by drawing a radio to “tune in” to the frequency of his parents’ lives. Thus the process of writing and digging into personal history is compellingly documented, if a bit indulgent in fantasy (but fantasy, too, is a prominent theme in The Wanderers).
Katerina Tannenbaum is the standout as Esther, her every word conveying hope and anxiety in equal measure. From her finding solace in books from the public library, to her friendship with Rivka (Sophie’s mother), to the distressing moment she learns the cost of testing her freedom, Esther is the conscience of the play. Through her, the audience poignantly experiences disappearance, hopelessness, the weight of a particular history.
A veil, Esther’s own, trailing behind her on her wedding night, becomes a recurring motif throughout. It becomes the tablecloth which dresses the play’s many sit-down interactions. It’s the blanket which wraps around Abe and Julia in a moment of physical intimacy which transcends their online correspondence. This choice to reuse and reimagine the same prop is fitting as the script flits back and forth between past and present, concealment and escape, memory and doubt.
“He who is in the miracle does not recognise the miracle.” The characters inhabit stories within stories, questioning whether their pain is truly their own or merely retold. Uncertain of when to take ownership and where to escape, they seek to understand themselves in different ways: Esther leaves Schmuli to raise baby Abe alone; Abe continues to email Julia, losing himself in fiction. What Sophie and Schmuli do, the viewer is encouraged to find out for themselves.
Overall, The Wanderers has provided a playful and complex space in which many age-old but nevertheless necessary questions have been raised. Indeed, the answers provided are not always well-executed or complete. But the lyrical language, wistful set design, and the actors’ overall convincing portrayals of turmoil, are all enjoyable facets of an ambitious play which tries to understand many things: what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be unhappy (perhaps forever), what it means to be ordinary, how to capture a past too close and personal to oneself, how to endure inherited legacies.
By Anna Ziegler
Director: Igor Golyak
Cast includes: Alexander Forsyth, Katerina Tannenbaum, Paksie Vernon, Eddie Toll, Anna Popplewell
Length: 2h 20m including a 20-minute interval
Running until 29th November 2025