Hanoch Levin REQUIEM

Aškava, 1999

Drama
First Slovenian Staging
Translated by Klemen Jelinčič Boeta
Directed by Matjaž Zupančič

 

Premiere: November 2011

 

 

Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin based his poetic drama Requiem on three short stories by Anton Chekhov, i.e. Rothschild's Violin, Sorrow and Sleepy. This thrillingly blunt, although as lightly as dreams woven text, speaks of death, sadness and mourning and wonders about meaning or meaningless of life. 

 

In a remote village, »somewhere between Paris and Shanghai«, an elderly maker of coffins, who was a hard and unforgiving person all his life, complains of lack of work. When his wife gets fatally ill, he suddenly realises how many opportunities he has lost, contemplating with bitterness that happiness can not be all that far away, and that he should have reached out for it, while it was still there. Death, disguised as three Cherubs is not coming only after the elderly. As if in a Dance Macabre, it also escorts to his eternal journey the coachman's son in his best years and does not hesitate at all about taking along the new born baby as well. The coachman tries in vain to share the pain of his son's death with a prostitute and drunkard, giving some black humour to the play, yet they do not care for him. Is it really only death that brings revelation and awakes man out of his self-infatuation?

 

Hanoch Levin, who died in 1999, is the most important Israeli dramatist. Throughout his 56 years of life he wrote 56 dramatic works, 22 of which he directed as well. He also wrote prose and poetry, remaining creative literally until the day he died.  The great expressive power of Requiem certainly derives from Levin's personal experience too, as this play was actually one of his last works. It was first put on stage only a few months before he died and has lived to see more than 400 repeat performances.  Levin's writing is characterised by his up-to-the-point and unique style, dazzling with its satirical twists and poetic metaphors as well.      

 

It was a wonderful, ravishing spring dawn. The birds were chirping widely. With all their might. As if the whole nature jumped towards a new day and there was really this feeling that everything had sense, although we knew nothing of it.