‘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?)
