Krum

A play with two weddings and two funerals

by Hanoch Levin / translated from the Hebrew by Leanne Raday and Frank Weigand

directed by Kornél Mundruczó

“Going abroad was a waste of time, mum! I earned no money, I didn’t get engaged and I made no friends. There’s nothing in my suitcase except dirty underwear.”

So begins ‘Krum’. The eponymous anti-hero returns home after a long time away. Home to where his best friend Tugati is still desperate to get married before, as he puts it, his imminent death, which he likes to advertise. And where the woman he loves, Truda is now established in the drudgery of everyday life with the man she settled for. With Beckett-esque humour and Jewish wit, all of them are wrestling with the notions of love and happiness. Trapped by their own inertia, they are all haunted by the same question: Why do we constantly miss out on what was meant for us, our better life? Why does everything feel like a lame party that has started too early? But where you would still prefer to get stuck than face up to tomorrow.

Special Screening / 18.11 10:00 / Tmu-Na theatre

Hanoch Levin was born in Tel Aviv on 18 December 1943, and died of cancer on 18 August 1999. He wrote plays, sketches, songs, stories, and poetry, and also directed most of his own plays. In his work as a playwright and stage director, he developed a unique dramatic and theatrical language, created by combining poetic written text with images designed with the actors, the set, costume and lighting designers, the composer, and the choreographer. His plays are characterized by his ability to combine the work of different artists, and have always been a celebration of words and visual images, based on a great love for the theatre and all who take part in the performance.
Levin left a spiritual-artistic legacy, which includes 56 plays (except for his political satires, only 33 of his plays were performed in his lifetime), two books of prose, two collections of sketches and songs, a book of poems, and two books for children.