Yevgeny Arye pumps my arm delightedly in the crush outside the Gesher Theatre in Tel Aviv. "Ah, you are a Russian," he says, inspecting my tear-streaked cheeks. But you didn't have to be Russian to be moved by the play we had just seen; only the flint-hearted could remain immune to Yehoshua Sobol's The Village, directed by the Moscow-born Arye and performed by the bilingual (Russian-Hebrew) Gesher Theatre ensemble.
In this dazzlingly pictorial production, the carousel stage spins indefinitely in the mind's eye, backwards and forwards in time: into consoling memory, into a chimerical future. This is a theatre of dreams, of nostalgia, of yearning and inevitable loss.
Yehoshua Sobol, aged 60, is known for his challenging political plays, including Ghetto and The Jerusalem Syndrome, which engage with sensitive issues such as the Holocaust, Arab-Israeli relations and religious fanaticism. He took Israeli audiences by surprise three years ago with The Village, a wistful memory play. Coming shortly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an ultra-orthodox Jew, when tensions in Israel were acute, it impressed critics and public alike, reminding them that their state had been founded on a conglomeration of dreams. The Village lyrically evokes the "strange peaceful period" in Palestine just before the creation of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. The play depicts "the small lives of small people", as Yevgeny Arye puts it, the fabric of life in a new, co-operative, rural settlement in the early 1940s, far from the crises of the second World War. "This was a very good time in Israel, those seven years under the British mandate, and Sobol had special memories of it," Arye says. "I tried to create a moment of innocence. I knew I was writing a Utopian play," Sobol said in an interview last year, at a time when the Arab-Israeli peace process seemed to have lost all momentum. "Our existence here is poisoned with too much history, too much politics, too much drama in the bad sense of the word. "People feel so helpless now. They are frustrated and confused and they need a kind of Utopia to survive, to be able to believe there is another possibility. This is why the response to the play is so strong. Everyone in the Government saw this play. It contains something from everyone's past, a moment of grace perhaps."
The play is set in Tel Mond in Palestine, where Sobol himself grew up, and the life of the settlement is filtered through the impressions of a wide-eyed boy, Yossi. Amid orange groves and high grasses on the turntable set, the small dramas of the village are played out in a fluid, dream-like sequence, like a Fellini film. "With its short, shifting scenes, it resembles a movie script," Arye says. The exuberant Gesher Theatre ensemble depicts a colourful cast of almost stereotypical village characters, including zealous Marxist settlers, a dashing British officer, a histrionic singer from Berlin, Yossi's stoical parents, two ebullient Italian prisoners of war, and significantly, Sayid, a gracious Arab trader. The desert war in North Africa is a distant rumble, watched anxiously by the adults for its implications for the future of the Middle East, while Yossi's adored brother, Ami, trains to fight in the Resistance and the British prepare to pull out of Palestine. Another spin of the carousel and everything darkens. "Which is easier to reach," asks Yossi as he leaves his innocence behind, "tomorrow or yesterday?" This is the first Israeli play commissioned by the Gesher Theatre, which was founded in 1991 by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, led by Yevgeny Arye , their artistic director. In St Petersburg, Arye was a director of both the Bolshoi and Maly Theatre (which visited Dublin Theatre Festival last year) and is committed to developing a rotating repertoire, with an ensemble, in the Russian style.
He directs all of the company's productions, but takes the actors' contribution very seriously during the long rehearsal process. "We were taught that the actor is central," he says. "Yevgeny is the one and only, certainly, but he's very, very open," says the Gesher Theatre's director-general, Ori Levy, a wellknown Israeli actor. "Every actor can give advice, offer interpretations, and he really listens."
Gesher means bridge in Hebrew, and the company seeks to build on the links between the Russian theatre tradition and the much younger Hebrew theatre. Theatre in the Hebrew language was born with the state of Israel; it had no history in the ancient world. The first Hebrew Theatre, Habimah, was founded in Moscow in 1917 and set up permanent home as the National Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1931. In its first year the Gesher Theatre confined itself to playing to the large audience of Russian speakers in Israel (Russian immigrants make up almost one-fifth of the population) but soon began to perform in Hebrew on alternate nights, and is now fully bilingual. The company quickly established a reputation for excellence and is generously subsidised by the state. This year it moved into a new home in the former opera house in Jaffa, a few miles down the coast from Tel Aviv.
The Russian actors' experience of immigration allowed them to identify with the characters in The Village, Levy says. "And the links with Russia were very strong among the founders of the Israeli state. Many of them came from Russia and there were a lot of pro-Soviet socialist youth movements. Yet to me The Village feels like a very Israeli play in its atmosphere: it reflects on our history." "The cast brought their own childhood memories into the rehearsals and their experiences of moving to Israel," Arye says. "For them it was a way of connecting with this place that has become their new home. This is an experience we share. I recently went back to Moscow for the first time in eight years and it had totally changed. I realised that my home town does not exist in geography, it is in time - and I can't bring it back." Just like Sobol's Village.
The Village will be performed in Hebrew with simultaneous translation on headsets at the Olympia Theatre, October 5th-8th, 7.30 p.m.
