THE raising of an actor’s voice on stage is a valid dramatic device, increases in decibels being intended to convey shifts in emotions.
Ordinarily, that’s fine. But when you’ve sat through one hour and 40 minutes of incessant shouting, you start to notice that the fall in one’s personal tolerance levels somehow seems to correspond with the ever-rising volume.
Daphna (Ailsa Joy) is a gesticulating, hyper-as-hell noise machine. She tosses her cascading Jewish curls and talks like a Brooklyn mama one moment and a truculent teenager the next.
That’s right. It’s a cliché as big as the Empire State building, a racial stereotype that should have gone the way of golliwogs on marmalade jars.
She comes into conflict with her brother Liam (Daniel Boyd) about who will inherit a family heirloom, his lack of Jewishness, but mainly the fact that he’s fallen in love with a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian.
Melody (Antonia Kinlay) is the woman of Liam’s dreams and soon must endure a racial assault on her ethnicity that makes Goebbels look like an amateur. I suppose this is what some might term as ‘positive’ racism.
Meanwhile, Daphna’s other brother Jonah (Jos Slovick) sits and simmers as he tries to shelter from the verbal barrage. 
Boring beyond belief, this is one Jonah you just wish will soon be swallowed by a kindly passing whale.
However, the main flaw in Joshua Harmon’s relentlessly in-your-face play is that it’s an opportunity missed. Instead of being a moving examination of a dysfunctional family disintegrating – a scenario many of  us could identify with - it becomes a navel-gazing rant that just happens to concern Jewish people.
The obligatory inclusion of the Holocaust merely serves to remind us of the protagonists’ ancestral history - but otherwise, there’s nothing really kosher about this work.
Bad Jews runs until Saturday (October 31).