Griffin Theatre’s latest show Shabbat Dinner is a theatrical offering unlike any you’ve probably seen before. Not a conventional play per se, yet indisputably a performance, the audience gathers around the Stables’ famous wedge of a tiny transverse stage, now featuring a long table with seating for about a dozen. Each patron is handed a cup of wine or grape juice upon entry and are greeted by three hosts, Kirsty Marillier, Amy Hack, and the writer and key performer, Jessica Bellamy. These performers appear as themselves, and present to their audience an exploration of what, primarily from Bellamy’s perspective, is their personal experience of hosting a Shabbat dinner. They seek to explain their understanding of the act and meaning of creating a not-so-traditional Shabbat dinner as modern, relatively secular Gen-X/Millennial feminist vegan Jews, living in present-day Australia.
As Bellamy explains, an important part of their Jewish experience is a cultural appreciation of history and lineage, both in terms of a notional religious belief in having descended from Adam and Eve, and especially from an awareness of one’s personal family history. Over the course of the show they seek to explain how these historical and ritualistic markers of identity are an ongoing and intergenerational negotiation between tradition and adaptation, remembrance and interpretation. Bellamy frequently evokes the imagery of bones, and describes how one’s understanding of family history, scriptural meaning, or even a recipe for traditional dishes are often just iterative impressions, “readings of readings”. As much as we try to honour the past, these repetitions are ultimately based on imperfect memories, as seen through the lens of our own perspectives.
Read the full review by Jack Teiwes at Australian Stage.