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This show about Olesker’s lengthy journey to becoming an Orthodox Jew in order to marry his partner is both elegant and nuanced
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Stage — Brian Logan
‘I would do anything for love,” Meat Loaf sang, “but I won’t do that.” Max Olesker would, if his solo show Making the Cut – based on his memoir – is any guide. It recounts the comic and writer’s conversion from liberal to Orthodox Judaism, a process required so he can marry his sweetheart – but which, in the meantime, forbids him from so much as touching her for years on end, and forbids much else besides. Secularists may be left reeling. Olesker himself clearly has deeply ambivalent feelings about what he’s gone through.
That all makes for a gripping story, of course, that begins when this former half of Max and Ivan meets his dream woman at the Edinburgh fringe. He’s Jewish, she’s Jewish: what’s the problem? It’s that the Olesker family’s loose-fitting and bohemian religious tradition is not considered Jewish by his fiancee’s. If love’s young dream is to be fulfilled, Max must renounce his name, foreswear his profession, keep his hands off his fiancee, visit synagogue three times a day in seeming perpetuity – oh, and get circumcised, too. (Who said romance was dead?)
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Elegantly told by our host, it can be a frustrating watch, as Olesker struggles to expedite this tortuous process so his ailing father, and his partner’s ageing gran, can attend the wedding. Good luck with that as the beth din , his authoritarian rabbinical court, shifts the goalposts. One of their objections: “Is comedy any sort of job for a Jew?!” Which is funny itself and so, often, is Olesker’s show, with its klezmer-ish musical number about life in Jewish Hendon, north London, and a sketch dramatising the circumstances of his circumcision.
And yet, I watched the show with gathering anxiety that all would be absolved at the end, as if it were so much character-building en route to Olesker’s cathartic fulfilment. In fact, it’s more nuanced than that: unstintingly diplomatic in our host’s telling, but still a veiled critique wrapped up in a rite of passage, aimed if not at orthodox traditions then at their means of enforcement.
• At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh , until 30 August. Then at Soho theatre, London , 3-21 November.
That all makes for a gripping story, of course, that begins when this former half of Max and Ivan meets his dream woman at the Edinburgh fringe. He’s Jewish, she’s Jewish: what’s the problem? It’s that the Olesker family’s loose-fitting and bohemian religious tradition is not considered Jewish by his fiancee’s. If love’s young dream is to be fulfilled, Max must renounce his name, foreswear his profession, keep his hands off his fiancee, visit synagogue three times a day in seeming perpetuity – oh, and get circumcised, too. (Who said romance was dead?)
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Brian Logan. Published 26 Aug 2026, 09:30 am.
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