Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and Ethical Metatheatricality

Hanoch Levin (1943-1999), the most prolific contemporary Hebrew playwright, has written 60 plays that have proven to be a major contribution to Israeli culture. He began with scathing political cabaret reviews, continued with ‘Neighbourhood and Family plays’, some of them highly metatheatrical. Since the early 1980s he dealt intensively with the very ethics of the theatrical event and its vicarious enjoyment of agony. In concentrating on the theatrical gaze itself and on the much-too-often merely entertaining aspects of theatre, his play-within-the-play techniques question the precarious relationships between art, message and box office rather than exploiting a free-floating general self-referentiality typical of post-modern tendencies. Many of his horror stricken scenes ought to be appreciated as moral traps for the audience, who are invited to ask themselves to what extremes they are willing to witness in life (as ‘theatre’) the suffering of an other.