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Nov. 18, 2005
Prolific productions
Israeli theatre culture thrives in reflecting reality.
MONIKA ULLMANN
Sinai Peter, former artistic director of the Haifa Municipal Theatre,
seemed unfazed by the tiny audience that had come to hear his lecture,
The Stage is Burning, at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater
Vancouver on Nov. 3. An accomplished theatre man with a string of
credits as actor, writer and director in major Israeli and U.S.
productions in theatre, movies and television, he launched into
a wide-ranging historical exploration of how the vibrant theatre
culture of Israel reflects and informs an often deeply painful political
and social reality.
According to Peter, Israeli theatre is part of public life, thriving
on a subscription-based model that struggling Vancouver theatre
people can only dream about. Tel-Aviv alone boasts no less than
seven major theatres, each with more than 30,000 subscribers.
Not all productions reflect current Israeli life, however –
many are simply about entertainment. Hamlet and a Neil Simon
play are being staged in exciting new productions. There is also
a flourishing theatre culture in other languages, including Yiddish,
Arabic and French.
"Tel-Aviv today has a culture of escape, so there is everything
there. But we found that the way to the hearts and pockets is by
producing original Hebrew theatre," said Peter.
Using video clips of seven productions ranging from 1949 to the
present, Peter gave a stirring panoramic overview of theatre and
how it reflects the "painful maturing" of Israeli society.
This is reflected in plays that moved from heroic melodramas during
the early years of Israel to the irreverent black comedies of today.
The plays show how Israeli society has moved from a homogenous and
consensual society to the pluralistic and often polarized one of
today, said Peter.
Perhaps the two most arresting items that Peter presented were contemporary.
One showed a clip of theatre-goers in Tel-Aviv being stopped for
identification by uniformed "soldiers" played by Israeli
actors speaking Arabic. It was so realistic that people were clearly
spooked. The other one was a clip from a darkly satirical play,
The Guide to a Good Life, which explores the tensions between
having a good time and living in fear of the next terror attack.
It shows a half-naked couple in a passionate moment, when the young
man, who is a broadcaster, gets a call to cover yet another suicide
bombing. Instead of leaving, he simply broadcasts from the bed,
describing a scene that he is intimately familiar with, while the
girlfriend sulks. It's darkly funny and most people in the Vancouver
audience were highly amused, if also somewhat bemused.
Igal Mosensohn's war drama, In the Negev Prairies, performed
by the National Theatre Habima in 1949, was inspired by the battles
of the War of Independence. The piece confirms the prevailing sentiment
of most Israelis at the time, which was the need to face the enemy
and make sacrifices. In this story, a son is sent behind enemy lines
by his father and, of course, is killed. It alludes to the story
of Abraham sacrificing Isaac and glorifies war, as well as mythologizing
the inevitability of death. Peter said this sentiment changed as
time went on, but pointed out that even today, "These events
are still very delicate."
Showing just how "delicate" it is to stage theatre that
communicates such sentiments is what happened with Honoch Levin's
satirical, The Bathtub Queen, which questions the euphoria
that reigned after the Six Day War. The bathtub queen is then-prime
minister Golda Meir and the hostile reaction from the audience closed
down the play.
"During that era, only a few dissenting voices warned that
there would be a price to pay for occupying millions of people,
and they were mostly marginalized," said Peter. One such voice
was that of playwright Hillel Mittelpunkt, who wrote City of
Oil during the Yom Kippur War. It's a play about the corrupted,
oil-rich city Abu Rodes on the eve of its evacuation. The narrative
shows an aging motel owner, her rebellious daughter and a madam
with two prostitutes living in the motel. Behind their vastly different
reactions, victory songs are sung by uniformed soldiers, much like
a Greek chorus turned on its head. This play represents the end
of what Peters calls "the illusory era." After this period,
theatre increasingly reflected a more nuanced grey scale instead
of the black and white reality depicted in earlier plays.
After the Lebanon War, it was possible to have Israeli as well as
Palestinian actors perform together and this was the casting of
Imagine the Other, a monologue of a soldier increasingly
tortured by his conscience. This production was mounted by the Neve
Zedek Theatre in Tel-Aviv in 1982.
The evening at the JCC ended with questions and discussion about
the theatre culture of Israel and a sense that Vancouver has nothing
that comes close to resembling it.
Monika Ullmann is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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