Playing Memory – Playing With Memory:

The Revival of Hanoch Levin’s You and I and the Next War 1968 - 2004: An Actor’s Auto-Analysis of an Intra- and Transcultural Transposition

Abstract

The article analyzes the 2004 revival of Israel’s prominent playwright, the late Hanoch Levin’s first performed work: You and I and the Next War. This Juvenalian satirical Kabarett – according to Kurt Tucholsky’s definition of adversarial political cabaret striving to change society rather than merely to entertain it – was first performed in 1968 as a militant protest against the intoxicated euphoria displayed by a victorious Israeli society in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Thirty-six years later – with at least three “next wars” and two Intifadas occurring in between due to the arrogance of those who did not heed Levin’s warning – the same cast of actors is being enthusiastically commended for their epic, subdued and introspective concept of the same text, as a “deeply exciting and painfully relevant theatre”. The main concern, therefore, of the article relates to the question of the intra- and transcultural transposition of a profoundly contextualized theatrical text. The article explores the differences between the performative languages, as well as semiotic and rhetorical codes of the two productions. The revival succeeds in shocking and – sometimes – even still enraging, while seemingly subverting this aim by deliberately invoking the mitigating nostalgic strain and the text’s mythical value. Thus the meta-theatrical discourse of the 2004 Kabarett proves that both the evil referents attacked by the Ur- production and the aesthetic devices used to combat them have not only survived, but have been appropriated and ritualized by an obtuse society as a symptom of their “normativization” and of the sanctification of an initially agnostic text. The decaying physique of the actors and their “stultified”, alienating body-language while they ironically and eironically re-present Levin’s inimical maxims in the new, restrained version – thus “challenging the processes of representation itself” in Marvin Carlson words -- embody the aging, deterioration, cynicism and indifference of contemporary, immoral combat and terror weary Israeli society. The novel, methodological strategy employed here might be defined as an autoreflexive analysis, since the author is a member of both the 1968 original and the 2004 revival cast. By means of “subjective self-objectification” he investigates what might be gained by assuming the dual and apparently contradictive positions of actor and spectator.