Bubble Schmeisis – Soho Theatre, London

Writer: Nick Cassenbaum

Director: Danny Braverman

Dry ice drifts across the stage, replicating bathhouse steam. Writer-performer Nick Cassenbaum and the show’s fabulous two-person klezmer band (Daniel Gouly and Josh Middleton) are all dressed in bath robes over wrappers. On clarinet and Italian accordion, the musicians are playing a jazzy version of Lionel Bart’s Consider Yourself while Cassenbaum, smiling and friendly, greets people in the audience, maybe softening them up for some later participation.

“Welcome to the Schvitz”, says Cassenbaum, explaining that the warm, tiled, traditional bath house is a place to sweat, have a wash, relax. He gets the audience to do a few therapeutic deep breaths and returns to these at intervals when the subject matter becomes more stressful. Cassenbaum intersperses an entertaining description of his first ever trip to Canning Town Shvitz with related reminiscences: Jewish summer camp, a youth trip to Israel, watching Tottenham Hotspur play football as a self-identified “yid” (nickname for Spurs fans), and assorted antisemitic incidents in South London.

Bubble Schmeisis is a powerful short play about place, culture and identity. The North Circular symbolically divides the areas where his grandfather and friends live now from the areas where they grew up. There’s mock-reverential music as the imaginary car passes the turn-off for South Mimms, sparking anecdotes about summer camp, where his mum hopes he will “get laid”. The show maps a specific, local psychogeography that stretches from Edgware to Docklands via White Hart Lane, the Beigel Bake, and other London landmarks.

Cassenbaum insists on the original East End Jewish pronunciation of beigel: “bye-gul”, not “bay-gul”, honouring the area’s Eastern European roots. The programme includes a glossary of Yiddish words used in the play, including “Lockshen” (egg noodle), “Pish” (piss) and – frequently – “Schmakiel” (penis). These are mixed with a smattering of Cockney slang: his grandfather had problems with his mince pies (eyes), and Cassenbaum refers to them as simply “his minces” for the rest of the show.

The staging is simple: a chair, a table, and a bathhouse locker containing various multitasking bits of fruit. The banana doubles as a phone, a hairdresser’s trimmer, a plastic machine gun. Director Danny Braverman makes sure each fluidly shifting scene is vivid. The musicians create ambience, musical stings and sound effects: phones ringing, car horns honking, old men laughing at the Schvitz.

The Schmeiss, a central concept in this comically-meandering meditation, is a bathhouse wash. It has an element of ritual, involving a special kind of raffia brush, plus soap, steam and intergenerational male bonding. The title also puns on Bubbemeises, a fairy story or old wives’ tale, and even the Cockney rhyming slang bubble (bath – laugh).

Laughter is the keynote. There are certainly darker moments here and sections that recent events have made edgier than they were perhaps originally written to be ten years ago. But Bubble Schmeisis is both heartfelt and funny. Cassenbaum’s plan is to retire the show and move on so this could be the last chance to see a poignant, feel-good comedy about the pains and pleasures of belonging.

Runs until 10 May 2025