Tyears ago, Deborah Levy I came across a cartoon that sparked his imagination. He included a figure of Freud seated in front of a rabbit on the sofa of an analyst. Levy, a novelist nominated three times and author of award-winning non-fiction, had started her career as a playwright but had not written a script for 25 years until she comes into the image. “As soon as I saw him,” she says, “I heard dialogue in my mind: a conversation, a serious and difficult conversation between a teacher and a rabbit, on contemporary anxiety. I knew it was a room, ”explains Levy.
The premise may seem absurd, but it is precisely the point – absurdism is a way of dealing with themes that have proven, in the wider world, dividing and even explosive to debate. Because two-gardens include a rabbit, he makes room for humor, for misunderstandings.
The play that came out of this impulse, 50 minutes, had a closed shopping race at the Neumarkt theater in Zurich earlier this year and will have its second round next month. The drama takes place during an hour and explores, in English, rather than in German – everything, anxiety and panic with frightening silence around a subject deemed taboo, although everything in a metaphorical or approximate way.
Levy's subtitle for this work is “The War War, Jaw Jaw, Bunny Play” and the rabbit speaks ostenously of aggression, fear and violence: “a fox can kill four generations of my family,” he says, “but he cannot kill my desire to be free.”
While Levy wrote the play, the world seemed to be heading for a story of the war, she said. “I did not want to pin the piece on a conflict, although of course Gaza and Ukraine are in my mind, it is more a collective feeling of immense discomfort, discomfort, disbelief, shock, uncertainty, fear and sadness. So the rabbit was going to be put to work as a issuer of all this. ”
He clearly resonates with the public: his first race required additional seats in the auditorium to meet the huge demand, with an audience seated along the stairs when the seats were exhausted. Levy was there and savor the buzz in the room. “The first night,” she said, “sit alone in the dark with the public, I thought I could have a heart attack. After all, I am not in the same room as my readers when they throw my books on the wall, or when they laugh or cry on something on the page. “
With Susanne Sachsse as a teacher and Hauke Heumann as a rabbit, the drama is both a fun and disturbing experience to watch. He incorporates music and dance (the choreography is designed to look like the dance sequence in Jean-Luc Godard's foreign film group in 1964, Levy explains). The aesthetic chime of the play with Levy's taste for European avant-garde theater, she says, but the influences beyond it also include “a mixture of Vaudeville and David Lynch”.
There is a set in layers, suggesting out-of-stage pieces, alongside a sofa and dali-esque lobster imagery. Heumann wears a rabbit mask and vapes from time to time while Sachse cuts an androgynous silhouette in a suit and tells his client that he should say everything that comes to mind. The rabbit speaks duly of intruding thoughts, which are simultaneous of another world and our world, he tells the teacher his fear of sugar and adds: “I have to stop scraping the news.”
Despite Levy’s start to work to work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, among others, and as the artistic director of The Man Act Theater Company, a radical initiative based in Cardiff, she had to get used to the medium again. “It took me a few weeks to enter the flow of writing,” she says. “At the beginning, the words on the page were a little tight, too didactic, not free enough. Then I started to understand its rhythm and its structure. ”
The play was ordered by Tine Milz, the leaving co-artistic director of the Neumark theater, who met Levy in Rome for the first time in 2023. They discussed a collaboration and Levy sent the cartoon of Milz shortly after. “She said it could be the basis of our project,” said Milz. “From that moment, we thought about what the teacher and the discussion of the rabbit could be. We talked about world politics and art … but mainly on a world that is fucked.”
Above all, Milz wanted a piece that would approach the feeling of dominant discomfort. “There is a crack in our world and a panic – a meaning, in Europe, certainly, that peaceful times are finished. But it is panic combined with a feeling of numbness – that I can do nothing, so maybe I will party or to look away because I am completely outdated. '' Milz, which was born in Germany and a part of a trio of female artistic directors Neumarkt, hopes to browse the room through the room across Europe.
It is relevant for everything that happens through the continent, she reflects, of the rise of the Für Dür Deutschland (AFD) in Germany in the election of the right Minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy in the post-Brexit landscape in the United Kingdom.
It is the duty of theater, she adds, to question difficult subjects, although it notes an increasing censorship in certain quarters of its industry. “I feel in the arts world that people no longer talk to each other because they have different opinions on things, but I think it's a problem. We can disagree on a lot, but we must continue to talk and try to understand ourselves. ” This play, in what she says, but also in her shortcomings and her opacities, tries to make a difference and to highlight it, she suggests, with, as Levy says, “something that is both painfully real and subversively absurd”.
