We round up the reviews for Sam Grabiner’s play, running at the Almeida Theatre until the 8th January 2026.
Broadway World: *** “What Christmas Day does achieve, impressively and frustratingly, is a serious attempt to stage Jewish disagreement without sanitising it. This is not a play about consensus. It is about fracture. About how history is inherited unevenly, how trauma becomes doctrine, how family arguments become proxy wars for global ones. In that sense, its messiness feels almost thematically appropriate.”
The FT: **** “Too often it’s a play of big speeches and big revelations, pushing pace and characterisation and structure to secondary positions. But it’s an incredibly clever one, that looks at the world with a sense of unease and sees the same looking back.”
Everything Theatre: **** “Christmas Day strikes a powerful chord in one act. The cast use Grabiner’s passionate and playful writing to show their collective great skill. As we make our way through the layers of meaning it feels very personal – from an examination of devastating current events to the introspection of a people’s generational trauma, from the meaning of identity to identifying what makes you. Because we live in the world that we do, and not just because it’s December, Christmas Day feels incredibly meaningful right now.”
The Guardian: *** “It is not a perfect play but an immensely courageous one. So is its programming by outgoing artistic director Rupert Goold. I have not seen a drama that deals with British Jewish identity with this much complexity. There are some manufactured rows between characters as a result, but they hold you, and emanate danger merely in their airing.”
Time Out: **** “Lindsay, Blenkin and Powley are particularly great as the father and kids at the heart of Christmas Day – their combination of ease with and disdain for each other is livewire, arcing between amusing (an over competitive quiz) to horrifying (certain opinions on Palestinians) in microseconds. Clearly it is likely to speak to a British Jewish audience most directly. But its depiction of a Christmas Day lunch spinning horribly out of control is – with intentional irony – a universally British concept. “
All That Dazzles: *** “Christmas Day is certainly an interesting play, and it has no shortage of strengths to it, but it also feels wildly inconsistent, suffering from uneven pacing and writing that doesn’t feel fully fleshed out.”
The Arts Desk: *** “Ambitious but tangled examination of British Jewish identity in troubled times.”
Theatre Vibe: “Although billed as a comedy, the humour is sparse. There are a few amusing moments, such as when the father, Elliot takes a golf club to the heater in an attempt to silence it. Without giving too much away, one of the tenants goes out for a walk and returns with a dead fox, which is placed on the dining table. This seems to serve no purpose other than to introduce a source of blood.”
London Theatre.co.uk: *** “I’m not sure Grabiner has yet landed the knockout ending his consistently intriguing script requires, but I look forward to the further iterations of a play whose onward life looks set to continue well beyond the single day of its title.”
The Stage: **** “Sam Grabiner’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut is a profound and eye-opening exploration of British-Jewish identity.”
WhatsOnStage: *** “The play is often funny, catching exactly the family tensions – the hyper competitive quizzing, the dislike of a new girlfriend – that rip apart many family Christmases. Grabiner’s writing is chewy and tough-minded. It tries to do a lot, raising so many difficult, complex questions that are impossible to resolve, and doesn’t always feel fully realised. But its portrait of inherited trauma is convincingly explored and James Macdonald’s direction, responsive to each change of mood, ready to allow silence as well as explosions, makes it intense and compelling.”
Theatre & Tonic: **** “This is a brilliantly acted production, very dark and very uncomfortable. Christmas Day in name, but not in spirit. The change in atmosphere will almost give you whiplash, if you can tear your eyes away from the stage that is.”
The Reviews Hub: * 1/2 “Or maybe it’s just a vast number of ideas being thrown on stage without much of a plan. It certainly feels like it. Some of the characters may, by the end of the play, act as if they have learned something deep and meaningful, but there’s no evidence offered to the audience of what that might be or where it came from.”
The Standard: *** “Christmas Day is often viciously funny, thanks in large part to the delivery of the always-excellent Lindsay and of Cooke, who brings exquisite comic timing as well as late pathos to Maud. Powley and Blenkin imbue their awkward, misfit characters with a strange fascination. This confirms the strong voice and experimental promise shown in Grabiner’s first play Boys on the Verge of Tears, staged at Soho Theatre last year, but I’m not sure his talent is fully focused just yet.”
West End Best Friend: **** “The play leaves an audience questioning so much, and its climactic prophecy of hope is something anyone can hold on to while experiencing the increasingly hostile attitude to otherness.”
First Night Magazine: *** 1/2 “This is not the perfect play, but sometimes the imperfect makes the strongest impact. The potential of Christmas Day is still on the rise — its transfixing topics and captivating conflict are a gem trapped between two plain, unfinished walls. With the right dramaturgical amendments, the show could evolve from a half-realised promise into a fully fleshed-out paragon. So far, nonetheless, the script mirrors the characters’ feelings of incompletion a little too closely.”
London Theatre 1: *** “A little too often, perhaps, the dialogue descends into the shouting matches of soap operas, and the 110-minute running time really is at the upper limit of how long a one-act show should run for.”
To book tickets visit: https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/christmas-day/