What is a satisfied man?
Hanokh LevinEverything begins with a feast. A little bit like in Timon of Athens, only much crueler, much more selfish. A rich man, at the height of his prosperity, has eaten his fill after having served his guests a fine meal. How awful surfeit is! What misfortune when “everything is corked up, sealed!” Fortunately Job has high hopes that his appetite will once again be sharp in six hours. In the meanwhile the beggars can feast on his left-overs – and the second-class beggars on whatever the others may have left. Everything seems in order: the social hierarchy is functioning, the body is digesting, each and every day can follow each other, resemble each other. But today isn’t like any other day: today will be the day of catastrophes – and the final day. A few minutes from now Job is going to exclaim with a moan “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,/naked came my mother out of the womb of her mother,/ naked come we out one from the other,/ and quivering and shaking we form one long naked line./’What shall I wear today?’ asked my mother each morning,/but at the end of the day naked it was that I laid her in the ground./And now here am I in turn, naked.” All is said in few words. The tone is simple and solemn, like the truth being spoken. But for Job the road to nothingness is still long… As in Le Chagrin des Ogres (The Grief of Ogres) this show won an award at the last Impatience Festival. Not the least of its merits is to confront us with one of the most successful, and most merciless, plays of an author whose stature has continually grown since his untimely death in 1999: Hanokh Levin. After Krum the Ectoplasm, which Warlikowski introduced to us recently, a completely different side of his work is unveiled in Job’s Passion: a realism using the oldest known myths as sources, whether they are from the Scriptures or from Greek tragedy. But Levin’s version of Job does not remove any of the old man’s truculence. Quite the contrary. Each scene presents us with ordinary people vividly portrayed in three lines. As for the hero he is even more harshly stripped bare and destroyed than his biblical model: his fortune, his family, his friends, even the consolations of his faith, all are taken from him in wholesale slaughter where there are no limits to cruelty or humor. The human condition is presented here like an exhibition of a horror that may well have no end – even death seems to provide no exit. A great artist is needed to put on display for us simultaneously the excesses of existence and theatrical excess – a little as if Blaise Pascal, having lost his faith, paid a visit to Father Ubu.
