After many of his books have been adapted for the stage and performed in the theater, the writer Meir Shalev for the first time comes to the position of a playwright and writes a play for the theater for the first time.
"Here in the Cave", an original biblical satire, will be staged at the Gesher Theater as part of the new repertoire for 2022/23.
"I have been in a friendly relationship with Roi Chen (the resident playwright of the Gesher Theater; MK) since he adapted 'Yona and a Boy' into a play, directed by the late Yevgeny Aryeh. He read the manuscript of 'Don't Tell Your Brother', the last novel Shelley even before he became famous, and told me without regard to the book: 'You know how to write dialogues, so maybe you should try writing a play,'" Shelley explains how it all started.
According to him, "I told him that I had an idea for a play, but I'm not a theater person, and he encouraged me to try. I really don't know enough about theater, but I started writing and I really enjoy this writing, it's something completely different. I feel like I wrote my first novel after Three children's books, it was a great novelty for me at the time and gave me a lot of pleasure, and it's the same now with the play."
Tell me a little about the play.
"The play takes place in the Cave of the Patriarchs. It opens with Jacob waking up after thousands of years of longing for Rachel, and deciding that he must go out and go to her. Then his grandparents and his wife and parents wake up, and what happens is that they try to dissuade him from his plan because they don't know what's going on outside. They hear all kinds of voices, not all of which they understand, and the main part of the play is when they begin to reckon with each other about what they did to each other in the book of Genesis - starting with circumcision, through Isaac's aqedah and Jacob's preference, and more. They have many accounts. This is a family Not simple, where the fathers are the fathers of the nation, but fathers are very bad for their children."
Politics is never absent from your books. Can we expect a sharp statement this time as well?
"It is both biblical and a little political.
In the end, this is a story about the most classic subject in literature - family.
But there is certainly also a political reference, from the point of view that in my opinion the relations between the sons and daughters of the fathers' family still influence us today.
I didn't want to make a biblical play where I return to their time, I wanted a play that takes place in our day, but in the soil."
"They come out of their stone closets and have conversations and debates there, and there is also some action. It has a political meaning, but in my eyes the main interest is the family, which is supposed to be the model of the Jewish family - Sarah is Jewish from the first mother, Yitzchak the first Jewish child, but there are tensions, Predictions, deceptions, terrible and terrible acts, preferences of one son over the other, a story about accounts that you never forget."
The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, photo: Sharia Diamant
Are there things you don't put in the play that would have been included if it was written as a novel?
"The truth is that I managed to put myself in the mood of a play. When you write a book, you can of course enter the minds of the protagonists and describe what they think. In a play, you can only note the words and actions, and for me, as a writer, in some ways it is more difficult, because it castrates some of the things which I love and am used to.
"In other respects, it makes the job easier. I have no tendency, even in my literary writing, to get into the depths of the souls of the heroes, because I think that this is also the role of the reader. I don't often watch the theater and I have never read a contemporary play. I read many years ago Years of ancient Greek plays, and I feel in a completely new field, and it fascinates me. It's not my natural home and I'm definitely enjoying it, it's adventurous."
And now that you're the playwright, won't you be involved in the casting and directing processes?
"The only thing I will take part in will be when the director tells me, 'I would like to change some things, we need to strengthen this or that scene.'
May I ask if there is already a plan for the next book?
"There is a plan for a new book, I already wrote some of it before I wrote 'Don't Tell Your Brother'. I wrote a few chapters and saw that it was okay, but not good, and I want to go back to it."
were we wrong
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us