If there is something different about Summerhall this year, it is that the Roundabout Theatre, usually sitting in the yard, has been transformed into a sauna, an actual one, where you need to bring a towel and swimwear, take off your clothes and either enjoy or suffer through the heat and steam. The staff even sent us an email the night before, reminding us to prepare for the sauna.

Part of the programme, Nick Cassenbaum’s Bubble Schmeisis, which premiered here in 2016, returns to the Fringe 10 years later for a remix, this time in the Sauna Theatre.

The combination of the performance with the heat and steam makes for an experience like no other. Cassenbaum runs around the sauna theatre and interacts with the audience, making use of the unusual space as part of the performance. The show follows Cassenbaum’s journey to the Canning Town Schvitz, a kind of Jewish bathhouse, with his grandfather, while moving between memories of his childhood, his trip to Israel and his experiences of Jewish identity. During the journey, he encounters different Jewish people in Britain, each from a different community, and their differences become part of his attempt to understand what being Jewish can mean. The intimacy created by the space, and the nudity is impossible to ignore. As Cassenbaum describes the scene in which he was about to become completely naked in front of everyone, even though none of us is actually naked, the heat, closeness and shared space make the story feel strangely intimate.

The show also contains two flashbacks to Cassenbaum’s visit to Israel as a teenager, including a moment in which a young girl describes the settlement of the land as if there were no people living there. In light of the increasingly prominent discussion around Zionism, these moments could benefit from a more nuanced discussion of the place of Zionism in his personal journey, and whether it has shaped him. This is not to say that Jewish artists’ work should necessarily be defined by their relationship with Zionism, or that they need to present their feelings to their audience in terms of right and wrong. Rather, the unsettling part is that this thread appears in the story and then ends without being brought back into his later encounters with different Jewish communities and his wider search for identity.

Perhaps that is also why Cassenbaum ends the play with a discussion of how to pronounce ‘bagel’ in the jewish community: Jews are not all the same, just as English or Scottish people are not all the same.

Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) is at Sauna Theatre at Summerhall until Mon 31 Aug 2026