Review: IN THE NET, Jermyn Street Theatre

An eruv is a holy get-out-of-jail-free card that permits Orthodox Jews to carry objects outside their homes on the Sabbath, something that would usually constitute work and be prohibited under Jewish law. In reality, it is nothing more than a wire that runs in a loop around a town.

Does writer Misha Levkov have any idea what an eruv is or whether he is employing a ludicrous amount of creative licence in In the Net, his debut play that that imbues a banal Jewish tradition with mystic world healing powers?

After the death of her mother, twenty-one-year-old philosophy student Laura becomes fixated on erecting an eruv in her hometown of Kentish Town. It's an odd decision. She may be Jewish, but she doesn't seem like the Orthodox type, with a nose piercing and a tattoo. Nauseatingly sophomoric, she imagines it as a silver bullet to solve all the world's problems, particularly that of Hala, a Syrian refugee threatened with deportation by Orwellian pen pushing local councillors. For some reason the councillors find the eruv to be morally abject and go on the warpath to tear it down.

On its most basic level the production imagines the world inside the eruv an Arcadian retreat, but it doesn't quite know how or why it reaches this conclusion. Levkov's focus is myopic, darting between jarring meditations on global crises and poetic musings. Neither have enough depth to communicate anything poignant beyond generic optimism. Is erecting an eruv really supposed to be the answer? Or is there something else going on here?

In the Net becomes more convincing when inverted and treated with a generous dose of cynicism. Rather than a cloying story of fighting the power, the play becomes a tragic meditation on grief. All the ingredients are there, the story of a girl who's mourning for her dead mother manifests in an obsessive fixation. It makes more sense. Why else would someone who isn't an Orthodox Jew be so hell-bent on building an eruv?

The North London in which the play is set could become the "North London" of champagne socialists, whose frivolous do-goodery is a vacuous gesture posing as activism. Levkov emphasises floods and drought looming heavy as existential threats. All that one insecure philosophy student, likely drunk on misreadings of Rousseau and Hegel, can muster in response is tying a piece of string around Kentish Town. A contemporary Cnut for insecure millennial slacktivists.

It's a shame that neither the director nor the writer seems to be aware of the play's critical potential. It is performed as a saccharine fairy tale, where the world is too easily polarised between flower power good and monotone evil.

Despite valiant efforts from the cast to breathe life into it, clumsy writing stifles their collective attempt. Poetic expositions become pseudo-spiritualist naval gazing. More naturalistic moments may bring things back to earth but at the cost of inauthenticity; Laura speaks how writers who are not twenty-one-year-old girls imagine twenty-one-year-old girls to speak.

In the Net is trapped by its own ambition, tied together loosely by too many hefty themes. Somewhere in there is an interesting play waiting to escape and see the light of day.

In The Net is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 4 February

Photo Credit: Steve Gregson

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