The Wanderers Marylebone Theatre October 18 2025

The Marylebone Theatre

The first thing to say about Saturday’s visit to the theatre was how fantastic the whole space was. The Marylebone Theatre is just a few minutes from Baker Street station, as long as you don’t walk in the wrong direction as we did! (Give me a paper map anytime!) It is very intimate with just over 200 seats, which have decent legroom and are very comfortable, especially compared to some of the older theatres made for shorter people back in the day! There’s even a lovely and very tempting bookshop in the same building which I highly recommend. It is the type of theatre that really deserves the support of the play going public, especially when it puts on plays like this.

The Play

The Wanderers is written by Anna Ziegler, the creator of Photograph 51 which my wife and I saw on the strength of Nicole Kidman’s presence. For those who don’t follow my theatre reviews, I have mentioned before that we tend to choose plays based on who is in them, because that way you get a far more varied and surprising range of theatre to enjoy. After this play, I will also be looking for anything by Anna Ziegler as she is a modern day great of the theatre in my opinion. She wrote this play as two plays originally, neither of which really satisfied her, but when she found a way to combine the two she was able to create a fascinating, multi-layered piece of theatre that requires the audience to engage on a deep level. The story revolves around Abe, a novelist who is trying to navigate his identity both online and offline. He is a person who both rejects and is shaped by his religious upbringing. His partner, Sophie, is dealing with her own issues of navigating her role as a mother and a professional within a culture that says you can have it all but doesn’t really explain how. Abe seems to some extent oblivious to her problems, and in this you see the first connection with his father, Schmuli, whose relationship with his wife Esther takes place in a very traditional religious community, which has very clear ideas of what roles a husband and wife must take. It is the relationship, that Abe is writing as the subject of his next book, perhaps as a novel rather than a biography, allowing for artistic licence and Abe’s requirement for keeping a distance between himself and his past. That’s how I saw it, and the beauty of this play is that each person will take something different from it in terms of the story or the meaning. Into this quartet of restricted, if not trapped, people comes Julia, an actress who sat in the front row of Abe’s recent reading, and whose correspondence with him after that drives his thoughts, his actions and his relationship with Sophie. The fact that the play was written in 2016 and features an email correspondence is very important because it means that both sides have that distance that allows initially for mild flirtation, but which also encourages the increasingly deep connection and increasingly risky reflections Abe shares with Julia regarding his relationship with Sophie. Will Abe pull back from the thoughts he is having before it starts risking his family’s happiness? Ziegler’s writing does not seek or encourage easy answers and the audience is challenged at every turn to think about what is happening, what it means and what they might do in that situation.

The Cast

Alex Forsyth plays Abe, the novelist at the centre of the web of connections that define this play. It is a performance that constantly wrongfoots the audience. On occasions you feel real sympathy for his plight, at other times you are irritated by his cavalier approach to those closest to him. The performance allows you to feel both, but to never settle on a particular point of view. It is a subtle portrayal of someone who could come across as self obsessed and unlikeable. Through Forsyth’s portrayal, Abe is someone who escapes that pigeonhole, but he is never a person you fully root for.

Eddie Toll as Schmuli, Abe’s father, navigates an even trickier role with real skill. In other hands Schmuli would be the play’s villain, an apparently fanatical and unyielding follower of his religion and its edicts, but Toll brings out the moments of confusion, despair and real tenderness with subtlety and beauty. He is trapped like many others of his time, and indeed nowadays, by a very powerful hierarchy that simplifies life by reducing it to a series of unbendable rules. The turning point of the relationship, where his wife Esther openly questions her role as simply a child bearer, sets in motion a chain of events that are shocking and which show a side of Schmuli that is just as shocking as the events themselves. That you don’t entirely lose sympathy for him is a testament to a multi layered performance.

Esther is played by Katerina Tannenbaum. If you have ignored the critics, which you really should, and watched ‘And Just Like That’ , you may recognise her as Carrie’s downstairs neighbour Lisette. Let me rephrase that. You may recognise the name and connect it to the programme but you will definitely not connect Lisette to Esther at any level. Esther is first seen as the nervous bride of Schmuli, trying to elicit a human reaction from him on the day of their marriage. It is a deeply sad scene that lays the path for the problems ahead. On the face of it, Esther is the only truly sympathetic character in the play. However, Tannenbaum does not shy away from showing her darker motives and her lack of understanding for Schmuli’s predicament. Her coldness towards him in one of the later scenes verges on the brutal. Although we may sympathise with Esther, the audience are left feeling very uncomfortable when she sits their ignoring, or perhaps even secretly enjoying, her husband’s tears.

Sophie played by Paksie Vernon is similar to Esther in that she is unhappy with the restrictions that are put upon her by a society that seems to make things so easy for her partner. She is waspish, sarcastic at times and clearly deeply discontented. Initially she seems to be the most easily understood, or at least the least complex character, but her role in the play’s twist makes you completely reconsider her and her motives. The excellence of the performance is that you are not left questioning where that twist came from, but you mentally work back and realise that it was in relatively plain sight all along. It turns out that Sophie is the person with the most to unpack in terms of her relationship with her upbringing, her history and her partner. The narrative around Sophie is turned on its head and she ends up being the most complex and unknowable character in the play.

Julia, played by Anna Popplewell, is a hugely successful actress who acts as the sounding board to Abe as he tries to search for meaning and explanations as well as solutions to his often self-imposed troubles. It was Anna Popplewell’s presence in the cast that encouraged me to book tickets knowing nothing about the play. Appropriately enough, therefore, her performance glows with star quality both as her character and in terms of her portrayal. She is at once attainable and unattainable, knowable and unknowable, a character that is both words in an email and absolutely a flesh and blood person. Popplewell made you really care about this disruptive presence in Abe’s life, but also made you question why she chose to sit in the front row at a small reading. Was it to entice him? Was it to develop a public persona of intellectual ability? Was it that she simply enjoyed the book? Her waspish wit and her ability to draw out Abe gave her the air of someone who knew Abe before the reading and wanted to get to know him better. The character could have been played as a straightforward Hollywood star, but Anna Popplewell skilfully dug beneath that facade to bring the audience into her world and to sympathise with her problems, cushioned as they were by money.

Final Thoughts

This is the best play I have seen this year. The writing was superb, the performances outstanding, the theatre marvellous and the staging innovative. As well as following the story with its interconnecting narratives, the audience are asked to consider the issues raised deeply in real time. I felt like a participant in the play at times due to the intimacy of the theatre and I had to reflect upon my own reactions at almost every point. It was cerebral theatre of a kind that is rare but very much needed these days. I cannot recommend The Wanderers highly enough.