Pickle
Park Theatre | ★★★★✩

Ari is in a pickle. That is, the kind of pickle that goes with being a Jewish 29-year-old woman who is trying to maintain a well-adjusted attitude to her love life.

Not easy as it involves sneaking boyfriends up to her bedroom with the stealth of an SAS raid in the hope of avoiding the attention of her sharp-eared mother with whom Ari still lives in Finchley.

And pickle also because with every romantic or sexual encounter (though never it seems both at the same time), whether the bloke is Jewish or (more often) “goyish”, there is that critical voice of guilt in Ari’s head to contend with.

A gooseberry at every tryst, this judgmental presence, which has the voice of the archetypal Jewish matriarch, is not above invoking the Holocaust to wrench Ari away from the man her involuntary conscience so disapproves of. “Did six million die so that…” — that kind of thing.

But as Ari promises, this is not one of those Jewish evenings serenaded by a mournful violin from the shtetl or which dwells on the Shoah. No, Pickle joyfully defies such expectations.

Well-written and even better performed by Deli Segal, this solo show sets out its stall with a very funny joke featuring an Isaac, a Moishe, a Jewish mother and some chicken soup.

Pickles credit Danny Kaan 3N8A8232

Segal in Pickles (Danny Kaan)

Yet the real comedy here is in the closely observed characters who populate Ari’s life, which on the unobservant-to-frum spectrum is lived somewhere in the middle.

Here Ari is tempted by the secular and tugged by the United Synagogue conservatism in which she was raised.

Gentiles are as convincingly conveyed as her fellow Jews. The Hooray Henry toff with whom Ari engages in drug-fuelled sex (apparently not as fulfilling as it may sound) is wickedly drawn and could be a cousin of Harry Enfield’s Nice but Dim.

But it is Ari’s frum sister-in-law Rachael who is skewered to perfection, the embodiment of well-meaning, shidduch-conspiring condescension.

Also tackled with stinging accuracy is the keffiyeh-sporting fellow partygoer whose idea of a good time is to engage Jewish women on the subject of Israel.
It is an encounter dodged by Ari with a skill honed from being previously trapped in such conversations.

Now she can spot such simple-minded intent from across a crowded room.
Granted, the internal voice of guilt thing feels overly familiar as a way of expressing Jewish angst.

But has a show ever so enjoyably conveyed the dilemmas of a clever, funny North London Jewish woman? Probably not. The evening serves as an excellent showcase for Segal’s prodigious comic talent.

But if the writer/performer so wished there might just be the makings of a Jewish Bridget Jones here.