Israel traditions and Theater

Israeli Traditional Theater

Traditional theater is part of intangible cultural heritage when communities recognize it as their own and pass it down from one generation to the next. This includes ritual and religious drama, theater linked to festivals and the seasons, puppetry and storytelling, and forms that combine theater with music and dance. It also includes the knowledge that actors, directors, and audiences share: ways of playing, of staging a story, and of gathering to watch it. Not every professional production is a heritage element, but theater as a practice can carry this kind of living knowledge [11].

Hebrew theater is older than the State of Israel by nearly half a century. Between 1904 and 1914, an amateur group called "the Lovers of the Hebrew Stage" performed plays in Hebrew at a time when few people spoke it as an everyday language. For its actors and audiences, putting Hebrew on stage was one way of bringing it back to life [1].

The first professional Hebrew company was formed far from the Land of Israel. In 1912, the teacher Nahum Zemach gathered a Hebrew troupe in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire. The war broke it up, and in 1917 Zemach started again in Moscow under the name Habima, “the stage.” Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre encouraged the young company, and his student Yevgeny Vakhtangov became its director. In 1922, Vakhtangov staged S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play of Jewish mysticism, possession, and love. It became Habima’s signature production and made the company famous across Europe [2]. Habima left Moscow in 1926 for a long tour of Europe and the United States. In 1931, the company made Tel Aviv its permanent home. In 1958, the Israeli government named Habima the National Theatre of Israel [2][3]. By then, Habima was no longer alone.

In 1925, the director Moshe Halevy founded "Ohel". Its actors were expected to work in the fields and factories as well as on stage, and the company performed for the farming settlements. Its first production, in 1926, was an adaptation of stories by the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. Ohel Theater later found its greatest popular success with "The Good Soldier Schweik" (1935), starring the comic actor Meir Margalit. The company was the official theater of the Histadrut, the labor federation, until 1958, and it closed in 1969 [4].

The Cameri Theatre, founded in Tel Aviv in 1944, set out to do something different: to tell stories about life in the country itself rather than bring over the Russian tradition that had shaped Habima. Two weeks after Israel declared independence in May 1948, the Cameri premiered Moshe Shamir’s "He Walked Through the Fields". Its hero, a young kibbutz member who goes to war, gave audiences a character they recognized from their own lives [5]. In 1961, Haifa opened the country’s first municipal theater, with Yosef Millo as its first artistic director [6].

In 1970, Hanoch Levin and his satirical revue "Queen of the Bathtub" set off a fierce public controversy. Hanoch Levin went on to write dozens of plays about cruelty, humiliation, and death, often laced with dark humor [7].

Each wave of immigration brought its own theatrical traditions. In 1991, the director Yevgeny Arye and a group of actors who had recently arrived from the Soviet Union founded the Gesher Theatre in Jaffa. Its first production, Tom Stoppard’s "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", opened that April. Gesher, whose name means “bridge,” has performed in both Russian and Hebrew [8].

Theater in Israel is also made in Arabic. In 1998, two companies came together under one roof in Old Jaffa: the Local Theater, a Hebrew-language company founded in 1990, and Al-Saraya, an Arab company. Known as the Arab-Hebrew Theater, they produce plays in both languages, separately and together [9].

Some of the most adventurous work takes place outside the established companies. Since 1980, the Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre has filled the old city of Acre for four days each autumn, during the Sukkot holiday, with new and experimental productions [10].

UNESCO counts the performing arts among the forms of intangible cultural heritage that communities pass down and keep recreating [11]. In Israel, that heritage lives in the companies, in their repertoires, and in the skills that actors and directors teach one another.