You enter a tall office building in the heart of Tel Aviv with a strict dress code. Take the elevator, up to the 18th floor to be exact, and visit the luxurious offices of a prosperous high-tech company. They offer you a glass of bubbly wine, greet you, and that’s it, you’re part of something else you’ve never encountered. This is how the play ‘Zirim’ begins, an original production by Givatayim Theater adapted from the play by the British Mike Bartlett and directed by Adi Gilat. You were not confused – the story completely left the medium of the stage that we have known so far, with the folding chairs, the fourth wall and the standing ovation at the end, and you are going to watch it happen literally a meter from you, throughout the software company ‘ryze’.
It all starts with raising the glass. The wine glasses are raised, and Viyal Sharoni, winner of the Television Academy Award and the director of the show, congratulates us, the limited audience, for our hard work. “What a successful quarter,” she said and noted our share of praise based on names sent to her ahead of time. I admit that at that moment it felt completely real, as if for the first time I tasted the taste of the high-tech that everyone is talking about. A full-fledged employee, with an inflated title and a Sibus card. Between me and all those who still didn’t fully understand what they were getting into, her mother (Einat Holland, who starred talentedly in ‘Saxon Girls’) was also assimilated, who mingled with extreme agility among the employees and rejoiced with us in the dizzying success of the company.
The plot follows her mother and her dynamic with her boss, a pretty everyday experience that we all go through at one point or another. But this is really not another standard employee-employer relationship, but a relationship that quickly becomes toxic and intrusive, when the manager, whose name remains unknown throughout the play, forces her mother with the help of sophisticated manipulations to share quite a few rather private secrets about her relationships with men. In the first scene, second after the cheeks, the two sit on the regulations of the workplace. Things are clear, the conversation ends, but it is evident that it is not going to end there.
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The decorated boss demands to know everything about her mother’s exploits, in and out of the office, until she discovers that she is having an affair with one of the employees. This is a completely different saga. She will demand that she end the relationship, which starts as another non-serious episode, even though it is none of her business, and waits for it with a job that looks like a dream job. As her mother and her partner, who in each show is a different guy from the audience around her age, continue to tighten the relationship, the mental abuse gets worse until it explodes. But such an explosion that you hear even down to the ground floor. In each of these moments, in case you were wondering, we are there, passing between the various offices to the dining room and another stand of sophisticated computers.
On top of the realistic setting, the innovative direction and the acting talent, there is an important story about a destructive relationship, about the manager’s jealousy of the young and promising version of her who has not yet closed all the options, about a shocking entry into the bones and a cut on the thinnest veins of the soul. A kind of gold cage on speedos if you will, which tightens up to the size of a divided apartment in Tel Aviv. In the days when the line between work and home has become more blurred than ever, partly due to our fault, and the status quo is to tell everything to those who work next to you, even at the cost of completely renouncing privacy, it’s good to have a show that knows how to remind, even with thick hints, what happens when things get out of control.
‘Zirim’ manages to be unique in its landscape and in the same breath to touch on a critical issue for almost all workers in the western world. The script, which adapted itself to the Israeli reality and to our characteristic philistinism, did not give up its close-knit British roots, which infected the audience with super glo for every second of the show. The interaction, as difficult and grim as it was, drew me in, and it was intriguing and mysterious until the last scene. The fact that I was standing within touching distance of everything that was happening, afraid that I would have to cooperate without planning my steps in advance, and even the music in the transitions between the offices, left me and the other 40 next to me mesmerized. Sharoni and Holland did it so well, as if their relationship is the one that is being tested, and it is evident from the applause at the beginning to the end, which I will leave you to experience alone.
There is no doubt that I did not know what to expect in the first moments, after all I have never spent time in a show while walking. I managed to discover a wonderful world of a tremendous format, which mostly makes me realize that it’s a shame I didn’t hear about it before. The trinity of Adi Gilat, Yael Sharoni and Einat Holland, made this acquaintance fruitful like no other, and this evening of my week really unexpected. Take the elevator closest to your house, the 18th floor is waiting for you. Have a good quarter.