Review: HOW TO BE JEWISH AGAIN at Hen and Chickens 29 & 30 July 2022

‘The bones of a good show are buried too deep to be visible’ ★★

Gillian Fischer is Jewish but has spent her life denying her identify. Now a mother in her forties, she feels compelled to reconnect with her Jewish heritage and roots. This one woman show charts her journey as she tries to reconnect with being Jewish. At least that’s what the blurb about the show said. However, this is not the show the audience got.

The show turned out to be Gillian Fischer presenting a PowerPoint slide montage of photos of herself and describing experiences of her childhood, her time in the Israeli army and her marriage. For most of this time, from everything she told us, she was fully committed to Judaism and the state of Israel. The only thing she appeared to miss out on was a Jewish wedding when she married a Japanese man in a civil ceremony in the UK. Therein lies the problem. This was not a tale of someone losing their Jewish roots and rediscovering them, but of someone who missed one of the experiences along the path of being Jewish and tried to build a show around it.

It was presented as a comedy stand-up routine. Anyone who writes will tell you comedy is one of the hardest things to create. Structured narratives (seemingly off the cuff) build up to punchlines that get funnier and funnier and bring an audience into a view of the world they have not experienced before to find humour in things they hadn’t previously realised were funny. Gillian Fischer didn’t seem to understand this. What she presented was a series of anecdotes that she felt were funny, but I guess you had to be there to see the joke.

When the audience failed to laugh at what she felt was a joke, she just kept repeating the line until someone did. When the audience failed to “aah” at photos of herself as a child that she thought were cute, she prodded them until they did. Not comedy techniques I’ve come across before.

I so wanted to like this show. I had really looked forward to it. When Gillian Fischer stepped onto the stage, she was clearly nervous, and I was willing her to do well. Buried deep, there might be the bones of a good show here, but the bones are wrapped in too much self-indulgence to be visible. Gillian Fischer is clearly a lovely, warm woman, who you’d get on with instantly if you met at a party. Sadly, a comedienne she is not.

How to be Jewish Again, written and performed by Gillian Fischer, Hen and Chickens Theatre, 29 and 30 July 2022

Reviewed by Meena Loury