Berkoff has little to say

There are some delicious performances in Steven Berkoff 's warm-hearted tribute to Jewish family life and its eating habits. But an absence of plot and some heavy-handed writing spoil what could have been an exuberant comic treat.

'Sit and Shiver' is a mishearing of the Jewish custom 'sitting Shiva', in which the family and friends of a deceased spend a week sitting on boxes and praising his good qualities. The corpse in question is Debby's father, a mensch who, Debby trenchantly asserts, was faithful to her mother for 50 years. Signs might as well appear marked 'Danger: Disillusionment Approaching'.

Such signs would be misleadingly urgent. For before the newsflash we get to watch three generations of Debby's family being characterful, and inevitably for Berkoff, indulging in a spot of expressionistic comic movement. They are fun to watch, particularly the older characters, though Sue Kelvin's monstrously self-obsessed Debby treads a fine line between being amusingly detestable and simply detestable.

But the structureless chat about strudel and bowel movements carries on for more than an hour without a hint of event. When the long-expected fancy woman does enter the fray, the sixth-form moral debate that follows suggests that though Berkoff knew what characters he wanted to write about, he got stuck deciding what to do with them. Shame.

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Sit And Shiver