The Assembled Parties, Hampstead review - a rarity, a well-made play delivered straight

There’s a line in the late Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play that refers to a recently elected showbiz type turned politician who sports puffed up hair – but it’s not the current incumbent of what’s left of the White House but Ronald Reagan. 

For the first half of this well-made play, we are in 1980, the election has just returned the former governor of California, and the Bascov tribe is gathering for Christmas lunch (these are liberal Jews) at the vast Upper West Side apartment of Ben (Daniel Abelson) and Julie (American actress Jennifer Westveldt, in her UK debut). An outsize Christmas tree of the kind you usually see in a fancy hotel lobby looms over the proceedings, whose guiding spirit is Julie, her rapid-fire repartee and her fine cuisine. That day it will be consommé, quenelles and goose. Bing Crosby is on the stereo, and all’s well in this venerable old mansion block.

Except there’s a leak in one of the bathrooms, which Jeff (Sam Marks) the lodger is trying to get the super to sort out, and Ben’s mother is dying in Mount Sinai Hospital. The significance of her passing provides the second half with a kicker that gives the piece a final, poignant lift. For now, we are getting to know Julie, a former actress devoted to her family, especially her kind-hearted, recently graduated son Scotty (Alexander Marks). Her wit is slightly febrile in its delivery but impressively sharp. Bing Crosby, she declares, is not her favourite, “a tiny acoustic rape”. Westveldt fleshes out the fascinating characterisation Greenberg's script has given her, both ethereal, even unworldly, and impressively literate. 

Will Scotty bring his Harvard girlfriend, Alana? Jeff doubts it. Through his reticence about Alana, we sense she is a renegade, possibly even dangerous (she has learned to build a bomb, “for extra credits”, Jeff quips), though distractingly beautiful. Unlike Scotty's cousin Shelley (Julia Kass, pictured below with Sam Marks), an extraordinary creature who looks like a longlost member of the Addams Family and shouts “Hi!” robotically at ear-piercing volume when she arrives with her mother Faye (Tracy-Ann Oberman) and bullet-headed father Mort (David Kennedy).Faye is a force-of-nature New Yorker, the kind you meet and feel you have been well and truly met. She greets sister-in-law Julie with, “I love what you’re wearing – is it your mother’s?” It’s a classic bitchy opener, potentially, and gets a good laugh, but that’s not wholly the intention here. Julie really does have a lot of her mother’s clothes and will return in one of her dresses, a glamorous wide-skirted pink number from what looks like the late 1940s. Faye, on the other hand – a role Oberman was born to play – is a well coiffed matron with no unruly edges. She’s tough but funny, especially about her bizarre daughter. “Who will take care of her?” she laments, a question we will learn the answer to in the second half. She also comes up with the immortal observation, about her dying but still kvetching mother, that “the sense of neglect is the last to go”.

The act is perfectly paced, speeded along by the use of a revolve that can transport the action from the dinner table to a sitting area with sofas and on to the bedroom of young Timmy, Scotty’s young brother, who’s laid low with a fever, and back again. By the end of the half, we know Julie is almost ashamed to be so happy, her husband much less so, and that trouble may be brewing with Mort over a ruby necklace. 

The second half is set 20 years on, when another shock candidate, Dubya, has just been elected President, and the apartment – still vast and needing a guided tour to navigate it – has clearly seen better days. The revolve has gone, and we are in a fixed set of dining area and sitting-room, where a sad Christmas tree is awaiting decoration. Julie is now swathed in a shawl; only Jeff from the first half is there with her, his doubts about the law having led him to abandon a good job in Chicago and return to New York. This time, Julie is awaiting the arrival of her younger son, Tim (also played by Alexander Marks, making a strong stage debut; pictured below with Jennifer Westfeldt). Faye eventually appears too, more matronly, her hairdo still an unmoving golden helmet, firmly lacquered into submission.

The decrepitude of the building has advanced to a critical stage, and it is being sold off piecemeal to the super-wealthy, for conversion into condominiums. One such buyer wants to buy Julie’s apartment. Tim arrives, but says he can’t stay, an anxiety-riven man with a secret, his body language all twisted limbs and downward glances. He pretends he is needed at the restaurant he works at, as he is Jewish and can be called in on Christmas Day with all the other Jewish staff. “It’s like a roundup…” (Cue nervous laughter from the audience in these more sensitive times.)

Greenberg now fills in the gaps, the inevitable losses and reversals 20 years can bring, some of them shocking. The two mothers, though, are twin pillars of continuity: Faye still tough-talking, earthbound and mordantly funny, Julie a more elusive spirit, undeterrably happy, seeing the best in everything. The final line is her gleeful pronouncement that it was the "best ever Christmas” and the conviction that even better times are coming. For an audience fully aware of what the next 20 years will bring in Manhattan – 2001 and 2008 for starters – this is an intensely bittersweet line, with just an injection of uplifting emotion in its final stages to keep the drama buoyant.

Director Blanche McIntyre has the full measure of the piece, drawing detailed, nuanced performances from her cast. You leave feeling you have gone back in time, to a point where you could expect a thoughtful, mature play that had been carefully staged and acted as standard fare for your hard-earned cash. 

• The Assembled Parties at Hampstead Theatre until 22 November
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