Director David Levin, who served as Habima’s artistic director between ’78 and ’85 and died in the UK at the age of 86 at the weekend, was unlucky. Despite being one of the main figures in the Israeli theater of the 70s and 80s and a prolific poet, in terms of his fame he stood completely in the shadow of his younger brother, theater meteor Hanoch Levin and some tend to ignore that beyond directing “Bath Queen”, his brother’s scandalous play, – A way of its own.
The news of Levin’s death brought me back to an interview I had with him in November 1975, when he was 40, he said, ahead of the stage premiere of “Mother Courage,” by Bertolt Brecht, a play – starring the impressive Lia Koenig – that was one of Levin’s career highs. Below are excerpts from the interview.
Levin was outraged by the reservations raised about raising the Brechtian play out of a claim that it would harm national morale and stated: “It is the theater’s duty to address existential questions. If the theater is denied this right, it is as if they want to close it. “Morality is something that belongs to very certain regimes and I hope they have nothing to do with our country.”
He was born in Poland and at the age of seven months Levin immigrated to Israel with his observant parents to south Tel Aviv. Levin said that he came to the theater from writing poetry from his youth, influenced by the performance of Aharon Meskin in the play “Golem” and the performance of Lawrence Olivia in the film “Hamlet”.
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On the way he served in the Central Command band with Moshe Troim, known as Moshik Timur. “I was a funny actor in the band,” he notes surprisingly, given the serious image he had. When he graduated, after working as an assistant director at the Cameri, he went on to study theater in London and Scandinavia, in cinema – in Italy. When he returned, he encountered a non-exorbitant reality here.
“I felt a greater openness among the audience than in the theaters, where there was terrible suffocation,” Halin said. “The mid-1960s were years of petrification of thought in Israeli theater, when the plays of Beckett, UNESCO and the like were treated with great disdain.
According to him, following the “bath stain”, as he described what happened to him after the play was downloaded after only 19 plays and accepted that “the chamber will become the most closed theater to me in the country.” Levin crossed the lines to the stage. He said that when he offered to direct the UNESCO “chairs” show there, he was required to cast the theater stars, 82-year-old Rubina and 72-year-old Meskin – he stood on his hind legs. “It is out of the question,” he informed management. “I need two young players, because the roles require a lot of physical strength.”
Here Levin won. Lia Koenig and Shlomo Bar-Shavit then brought Habima to one of its peaks. However, this was not guaranteed in advance. “I did not invite Finkel to the general rehearsal (then the artistic director of Habima – IBA) because I was afraid he would collapse everything following the smear campaign against me. Only after the show came out did he come to see her and hide his admiration – and see his natural heir “.
Levin was appointed in-house director at Habima and, as mentioned, was appointed artistic director in 1978. Among the plays he directed there were “Witzek,” “Richard III,” “King John,” “Medea,” “The Good Soul from Sichuan,” “The Miser,” and “A Long Journey into the Night.” After finishing his role there, he directed mainly abroad, mainly in Germany.
Levin was married three times and left behind two sons (and six grandchildren) – a son (56), an actor and director and Assaf (52), an opera director.
Levin will be brought for burial in Israel.