The legacy of horror underlying Jewish jokes
Theatre Royal, Bath
EVERYONE KNOWS what Jewish humour is, right? Good luck actually defining it, mind you, though a certain resignation to all that life can throw seems to be one quality, only without the fatalism. Because if you’re fatalistic what is the point of complaining? And if you can’t complain, you surely can’t be Jewish. As the waiter said to the Jewish ladies having lunch: “Is anything all right?”
The point is we know funny Jews when we see them and, in this play by the Pulitzer-winning American dramatist Donald Margulies, which is set in the 1980s and was first seen in 1995, Lola and Max are instantly recognisable.
Played to perfection by Ian Gelder and Diana Quick in Laurence Boswell’s excellent production, the couple are the kind of ageing Jews that have populated many a US comedy. They speak to each other in mittel-EuropeanAmerican-English accents, in mutually chiding but loving banter and, rather like Jerry’s parents in Seinfeld, they have moved from their Brooklyn home to retire to Florida. But their condo isn’t ready and, with a whiff of suspicion that the estate agents have treated them uniquely badly, they have to spend a couple of nights in the prop- erty developer’s showroom or “model apartment” while theirs is finished.
With increasing resignation, Max discovers that the TV, radio and even the fridge are all fake. They eat break- fast before they go to bed in case the milk goes off by the morning. Neil Simon couldn’t have set up this situation better. And then Deborah arrives. Or rather she has tracked them down. Because it turns out that Max and Lola are not retiring. They are running — from Deborah, their grossly overweight, fiercely intelligent, needy and unhinged daughter.
And it is here that the play unflinchingly excavates what lies beneath the Jewish humour tropes that descended from the Pale immigrants escaping pogroms or, as is the case with Lola and Max, the Europeans who survived the Holocaust.
For it is not just too much food that Deborah has been fed, but the story of how her parents survived the Holocaust. There was the Deborah who lives on only in her father’s tormenting dreams and after whom his daughter was named. And when Lola recites her oft-repeated experience in Belsen, Deborah mouths every word; lip-syncs every syllable. She is not just a child of Holocaust survivors but a descendant of it; the embodiment, every grotesque inch of it, of the six million.
Yet, although Margulies fearlessly explores the legacy of atrocity, the more interesting point is only nearly made by this play — that beneath some of the greatest comedy lies unimaginable suffering. Of course, it may never have been Margulies’s intention to explore the relationship between Jewish humour and Jewish tragedy. But if the comedy here had been developed as fully as the tragedy, I can’t help thinking that the result would have been a masterpiece.