CULTURE - Israel: An Introduction - page 298

whole school of new writers and actors, including Yehoshua Sobol, Itzik Weingarten, and Hil-
lel Mittelpunkt.
Theater and War
A crack in Israel's national consensus caused by the Lebanon War of 1982 was immediately
expressed through theater, both in original dramas and in interpretations of translated classics.
The collegiality of the earlier period was replaced by antagonisms so great that some theater
groups and intellectuals supported attempts to censor Hanoch Levin's bitter antiwar satire The
Patriot , in sharp contrast to their opposition to any similar action toward The Queen of the
Bathtub in 1970. The post -Lebanon War years led to the creation of a protest theater. The new
trend in theater was sober, with warring sentiments; plays simultaneously praised the Zionist
dream and spoke of its demise.
During this time, the unique Acco (Acre) Festival of Alternative Theater was initiated by
Oded Kotler, becoming a showcase for experimental theater. Yet the Haifa Theater remained
the leader where delicate topics were concerned. For example, plays produced there discussed
the Israeli-Arab confl ict to a much greater extent and used more Arab actors. It managed to
express their identity confl ict in plays like The Island by Faugard, of which two versions were
produced — one in Hebrew and one in Arabic (1983); Waiting for Godot in a Hebrew-Arabic
version (1984); and The Palestinian Girl by Yehoshua Sobol (1985).
However, by the end of the decade, the sounds of protest and criticism were silenced as the
public grew less interested in heavy topics. The dramatic change in the theatrical scene, after
which theater in Israel was never again the same, occurred in the summer of 1987 with the
staging of the play Les Misérables , performed in the Cameri Theatre. The play was Israel's fi rst
theater spectacular, produced with sophisticated light and sound equipment never before used
in Israel. For the fi rst time in an Israeli theater the audience and the critics cheered the techni-
cal achievement itself. Michael Handelzlats, theater critic for the Ha'aretz newspaper, called
the applause a “production value”; technical effi ciency was valued over substance, unlike in
traditional theater in the state's early days.
This change indicated, on the one hand, the technical maturation of Israeli theater and the
public's demand for high standards. Yet it also signaled that important ideological messages
were no longer considered suffi cient by the theatergoing public. The repertory theaters started
to produce more plays with a commercial orientation. Among them were musicals, which un-
til then had been seen as too professionally challenging and demanding for the actors. Even the
daring Acco Festival began to follow this trend; the artists who participated used it mostly as a
springboard to join the establishment and not as a laboratory for daring artistic experiments.
Young acting-school graduates, who were recruited to the institutionalized theaters straight
from school, were primarily interested in acting as a career path. Though these standards are
normative in Western countries, in Israel they refl ected a change.
Contemporary Theatrical Trends
At the eleventh Acco (Acre) Festival in 1990, the fi rst-place prize was awarded to the play Reu-
lim (Veiled), the fi rst play by the young playwright Ilan Hazor. It was the fi rst Israeli play that