Writer: Deli Segal
Director: Kayla Feldman
In Pickle, actor Deli Segal blurs the line between a one-woman drama and a stand up comedy routine. So confident is she that you can’t help but wish she’d occasionally forget the script and go off-piste. But this criticism just shows how entertaining she is in this story of a woman looking for the perfect Jewish husband.
We meet Ari inviting a ‘goyish’ man back to hers. But the thing is, at the age of 29 and ¾, Ari still lives at home with her parents. They have to creep upstairs like teenagers. The sex doesn’t go well; he mentions Schindler’s List, while she is plagued by a Jewish conscience that tells her that she must find a Jewish man to marry.
Over the next hour, we follow Ari on her quest to find Mr Right while she avoids the machinations of her parents and her sister-in-law Rachel. The story isn’t a novel one, but Segal makes it seems like new with the focus on a British Jewish experience, rather than the familiar New York one we see in films. Ari is British, and so is reserved, passive aggressive and apologetic. She is Jewish but also has a lot in common with Bridget Jones and so she’s an enigma both to the American Jewish man she meets and to her non-Jewish friends who take her to Christmas parties.
The story is very funny too, and while you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate all the jokes, it may help if you are to grasp every nuance of Segal’s performance. For instance, she describes the difference between Jewish people in London, dividing them into ‘Frum’, and ‘Non-Frum’, even giving these categories geographical locations in London, which have the crowd roaring. These interludes, like skits in a cabaret, work well to break up Ari’s tale.
Sometimes the story flags a little – the Christmas carol concert scene seems a little clichéd – and as the narrative encompasses a few months, it does wander. Perhaps more could happen on a single night, providing greater emphasis on Ari’s sense of disconnect from both the worlds that she lives in. But if the story flags, Segal certainly doesn’t and the epiphany, when it comes, is unexpectedly joyful and very ‘London’ too. It’s a great ending.
Playing as part of the Come What May Festival, a collection of shows affected by the VAULTS festival’s cancellation, it would be easy to see Pickle playing in a late-night slot down underneath Waterloo Station. However, it feels perfectly at home in North London’s Park Theatre.
Runs until 7 May 2022
