It's hard to imagine a more appropriate venue than the Demonstration Room at Summerhall for Nick Cassenbaum's coming of age tale. Part lecture theatre, part morgue, its spartan walls, patchy concrete floor and echo-chamber acoustics double perfectly for The Schvitz, the Canning Town steam rooms where, after serving the appropriate familial apprenticeship, the young Nick is inducted by the alta kakas (old Jewish men).
Cassenbaum comes across as a natural storyteller, capable of painting vivid pictures and delivering fully formed characters.
Dressed in a stripy towelling robe, wrap and flip flops, Cassenbaum, weaves his entertaining tale accompanied by his similarly attired backing musicians who provide both traditional Jewish folk tunes and punctuation. He takes us on a car journey, with grandfather Poppa Alan and his cronies, along the North Circular from the plush environs of Stanmore and Edgware to east London where the alta kakas grew up. Along the way, we are introduced to Stacey Pinkus, a didactic and pretentious youth leader who scorns Nick's Essex massive in favour of the more refined Hampstead and Hendon tribes. Finally, we arrive at the Schvitz where Nick, the boy, becomes a man. Aptly, given the venue, we are given a demonstration of the eponymous cleaning ritual, the Schmeiss, which hovers somewhere between the erotic and the unpleasant.
Cassenbaum comes across as a natural storyteller, capable of painting vivid pictures and delivering fully formed characters. There is poignancy and comedy, pace and energy, commitment and passion and, to this reviewer anyway, shades of the performer/writer Steven Berkoff at his most animated. But there is a caveat. The world Cassenbaum so accurately describes has an old blanket feel to people like me, an - albeit secular and atheist - north London Jew. Everything chimed for me, including the Yiddish for which a glossary is provided for the uninitiated. But while I – and Cassenbaum's many Jewish punters – were able to wallow in the familiar, I'm not sure how well it played to those not steeped in the culture. For me, then, it's a four star show but probably three stars in the bigger picture.
