‘This is a mikvah,” states a character at the opening of this two-hander about gay male desire as he stands over what looks like a swimming pool. “A mikvah is a gathering of spring water,” he explains, used for ritual bathing in the Jewish community.
He is 17-year-old Eitan (Josh Zaré), who is friends with Avi (Alex Waldmann), a married man of 35; they are “postmodern orthodox Jews” who go to the same north London synagogue and see themselves as heterosexual until their kiss in the mikvah.
Josh Azouz’s play was first performed at the Yard in 2015. Georgia Green’s production, which begins with Hebrew song, has a jarring mix of comedy and meta-theatre which conspires to keep the audience, and the leads, at an unsatisfactory distance. The men speak to the audience intermittently, often narrating in the third person. Despite the eloquence of the story being told, it sounds like a better fit for the page than the stage and the acting seems half-hearted, as do the too few first-person exchanges between the characters. “Stop thinking in third person and talk to him,” says Eitan to himself in a stagey joke that sums up our frustration too.
A physical distance between Eitan and Avi chimes with the notion of fearful desire. Avi strives to suppress his feelings and says he is happy with his wife. The men position themselves at opposite ends of the stage, which is designed by Cory Shipp as a mikvah with changing room hooks and towels at either end. Sometimes their distance works, such as when Eitan says: “I want to touch you.” Avi invites him to imagine doing so, and a potent silence follows.
But these charged, intimate instances are too few and the comedy punctures any intensity between them. “Thinking about you makes me nauseous,” says Avi. It is a heartstopping moment but in the very next line he is back to bantering about football. Eitan is a playful character but his teenage facetiousness flattens out subtleties and renders him emotionally impenetrable; Avi is at once emotionally evasive and scolding of Eitan for his desire.
Naomi Alderman’s novel about same-sex desire, Disobedience, also set in north London, and Haim Tabakman’s film Eyes Wide Open (set in Jerusalem) conjure the tension, sensuality and tenderness between their central characters that is missing in The Mikvah Project.
•At the Orange Tree theatre, London, until 28 March.
