"The Banality of Love" is the first play by Savyon Liebrecht that is not an adaptation of one of her stories but was written as a drama, and it aims high: Not only in the choice of characters, historical and controversial figures, philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, but also in speaking on topics ostensibly too abstract for the theater and contradicting dramatic logic - not to mention the impatience of the Israeli audience for anything that is not "action." This is a play with "talking heads," discussing thought, existence and language, as well as Zionism, nationalism and Nazism.
And yet, an hour and a half of theater passes in the blink of an eye, because Liebrecht had the sense to concentrate on two banalities, which take her fascinating intentions on the path to success: emotions and details. The play's protagonists are two philosophers of sharp intellect, but Liebrecht writes, based on the published correspondence between the two (to no small extent thanks to Arendt's passion for documentation), about the heart and passion. Those are the things over which, with all their sophistication, these two had very little control.
Perhaps most important of all, Liebrecht knows how to concentrate on a detail whose concreteness makes it possible to clarify in the theater what hours of reading philosophy would blur to the limits of understanding. The first encounter between Heidegger, the esteemed German professor, then 35-years-old, married and the father of two, and Arendt, a brilliant 18-year-old Jewish student, takes place in a mountain cottage belonging to one of Arendt's classmates, a fictional Jewish student. When Heidegger absentmindedly picks up a pillow from the bed (which serves as a highly significant piece of furniture, though barely used in the play), he finds underneath it a hammer that Arendt hid in embarrassment while tidying up the place before teacher meets student.
Thus, Liebrecht has Heidegger use in a dramatic situation an example from his writings about a transparent situation in which a carpenter uses his work tools without giving it a thought and then pays attention to the explicitness of the tool, the moment in which a breakthrough in perception occurs, requiring him to reshape his attitude to reality. Arendt adds that because he is fated to do so with words, which are limited in their ability to contain or describe reality, he reaches a dead end.
That, of course, is my vulgarization of Liebrecht's attempt to demonstrate the complexity of Heidegger's ideas, which are explained in his important, 1927 book "Being and Time" and in many other writings. These ideas seem totally incomprehensible to many people in our era (as a young student claims when he comes to interview Arendt in her old age).
By means of this scene, which is both a philosophy lesson and a picture of mutual temptation between an esteemed teacher and an admiring student, Liebrecht provides tools for understanding what happens to the characters later. In 1933, Heidegger became a member of the Nazi Party and the rector of the University of Freiburg, where he instituted the Nazi salute and expelled Jewish teachers and students. These facts are known, just as there is no doubt that at least at the beginning of his career, he believed in Hitler and in his path. In one scene he tries to convince the young Arendt that Hitler is only using racism to garner votes, but beyond that, you understand, he is the strong man who will save the country and the purity of its culture; every audience member is invited to draw analogies to the Israeli present.
In the scene portraying the nadir of Heidegger's career, he is standing far upstage, on the backdrop of a screen properly illuminated for a Nazi parade, wearing a Nazi uniform (the lighting, very impressive in general, was done by Keren Granke). Oded Kotler, with a haircut reminiscent of the Fuhrer's, looks like the real thing throughout the play. And here - and mainly in the explanations by Heidegger and Arendt for his behavior, in hindsight, the metaphor of the hammer and the carpenter, the tool and its user, resonates. The music heard in the background is Mahler's Sixth Symphony, chosen, no doubt, because the composer was Jewish, although Wagner would certainly have been more suitable and right for the spirit of the period and of the man.
Heidegger believed he was using Hitler, while pretending to be an obedient tool, to resurrect the genuine Germany. Arendt claimed the Nazis used him. On the other hand, Arendt understood during their relationship, certainly even more toward the end of her life, that she was a willing tool in Heidegger's hands, and he used her. The fact that he enjoyed it is not relevant here; she enjoyed herself, too.
In short: The philosopher and his student can philosophize about themselves, about the carpenter and about the hammer. But they, and all of us, merely function as a hammer. We are convinced that we are hitting nails on the head, or are iconoclasts, but in the final analysis the driving hand - our passions, history and simple human irony - use us.
Such reflections are quite a lot to base on an 80-minute play. Liebrecht presents two main time frames, Germany of the 1920s in the cottage where the pair meet, and New York of 1975, the apartment of the ailing Arendt, who died that year, in which an Israeli student comes to interview her, claiming it's for the university archive. There is no clear divider between the times and places - there is the intermediate plane, of the correspondence, in which times intersect in the play. Avishai Milstein directed it wisely on the backdrop of Eran Atzmon's functional sets. The aging Arendt prompts her young alter ego with lines, props move from side to side. At any given moment the play is both in present action and in Arendt's memory.
Liebrecht invented the character of Arendt's Jewish classmate in whose cottage the meetings with Heidegger took place. Kobi Livne shapes the character of Rafi Mendelssohn with great charm, and he is also the one who, with profound and considerable persuasiveness, plays the the student who comes to interview the aging Arendt in New York. This part of the play enables Arendt's character to expound on her ideas about Zionism from its inception and to explain things she wrote in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," whose publication led to her being called an Israel-basher. Liebrecht has Arendt and her interlocutor raise the issue of Israel's attitude toward the extermination of the Jews of Europe and the Eichmann trial, a subject recently raised in Hillel Mittelpunkt's play "Anda."
These things should be heard; it is impossible today to argue with the kernel of truth they contain. In this fictional student, Liebrecht is tempted to create dramatic symmetry, to tie up loose plot ends from the first scenes, enabling her also to make a stronger case for the complaints that German Jews have against Israel and against Jews who returned to Germany. This seems forced to me, and it digresses from am achievement that is complete even if not everything is tied up.
Liebrecht's title, "The Banality of Love," seems to say that behind the clash of the philosophical titans stood flesh-and-blood people with banal weaknesses. Heidegger really did love Arendt, as well as Hitler. And she loved him, and continued to love him.
Oded Kotler does not try to make us like the infatuated philosopher. With his acting experience he reveals gradually how simply banal and childish everything can be. He looks great. At both ages of the character he plays, his hair importantly shapes his character. Apparently, the brilliant philosopher was a naive male. Kotler knows how to convey this very well.
Arendt's role is divided in two. Michal Shtamler is the young Arendt, beautiful, slender, sharp-tongued, who even then knew how to be in control of their relationship, although she knew she was being controlled. The scene in which she turns a formal dialogue about how they should address one other from an exchange about food to a seductive patter is a masterpiece of writing and acting.
Liora Rivlin as the elderly Arendt does a good job of shaping her character, taking care with the accent and mainly with the pitch of her voice, which she lowers (something that always serves her well). Her climactic scene comes during the protagonists' 1950 encounter, in which she makes good use of the foundation laid by Shtamler to approach the turning point in Arendt's life, when she apparently become "authentic," something Heidegger preached about. She stuck to her opinion as a Jew, a woman, a person and a philosopher and understood that anyone can be both a user and used, both an exploiter and exploited, because of that banal thing called love.
The end, in which the young Arendt and the elderly Arendt meet center stage and each silently smokes a cigarette (Shtamler offering Rivlin both smoke and light), standing almost head-to-head, ends this intellectual, emotional and aesthetic theater experience with an attractive, visual chord.
