Leigh pays his dues

So up-to-date is Mike Leigh's much-anticipated new play that at one point his characters discuss Bush's response to the Katrina disaster. It's a striking symptom of a work that aims for a carefully plotted, almost transparent realism in its efforts to mirror the natural rhythms of family life.

Leigh's setting is a liberal, secular Jewish household, rocked to the core when the 28-year-old son, Josh (Ben Caplan), discovers orthodox Judaism. His grandfather Dave, beautifully realised by John Burgess, demands that Josh explain himself: a reasonable request in a family which has never shied from discussing the state of the world.

It's a subject that occupies a good 75 per cent of the play: entire scenes are taken up with ordinary husband and wife, Rachel and Danny, talking casually on the sofa about Gaza, Sharon's political future and American imperialism. Beneath all this drifts a sense of crisis in Jewish identity, in which orthodoxy and Zionism are considered anathema to the proud Jewish tradition of intellectual independence.