However, after her success in EastEnders, she was offered "a lot of work" and was "in a position where I could green-light stuff for myself", determining that "this was the moment when I was going to make this dream happen".

[6] This informed the new Jewish sensibility of the play which was anchored to the tone of Chekhov's original, where the melodrama of the Pozorov family masked the pain and social upheaval all about them.

Oberman felt this echoed the way the Jewish community in Britain acted in the wake of the Holocaust: "people that close to the Second World War just didn't talk about it – a bit like the elephant in the room".

[2] The play was well reviewed, being described as "an inventive reimagining"[7] and "a bold, fresh and fruitful reinterpretation", showcasing "lively and intelligent" writing.

[10] Similarly, The Guardian's theatre critic felt the piece to be "a surprisingly faithful transposition", which "ingeniously" solves some of the problems inherent in relocating the original, but objected to what he saw was a "dependence on authorial cleverness in finding post-war parallels to their source".