JERUSALEM - Einstein, a one-man show from Tel Aviv's Nephesh Theatre, is travelling 10,000 kilometres to make its Hebrew-language debut in North America in Winnipeg.

The play about the Nobel laureate with the fantastic shock of wild, white hair stars 68-year-old Israeli Victor Attar. It is to be performed in Hebrew in Winnipeg on Dec. 5, a night after playing there in English.

Einstein is being brought to Manitoba by Canadian-Israeli businessman Nathan Jacobson to honour the memory of Phil Guberman, who died this year.

Before going their very different ways, Jacobson, Guberman, Einstein's director, Howard Rypp and its playwright, Gabriel Emanuel, who is now a lawyer in Toronto, grew up together during the 1950s and 1960s in Winnipeg's vibrant Jewish community, where they shared a love of theatre.

"We all knew each other from the age of four, so it seemed only natural to do this tribute for Phil in Winnipeg," said Rypp, who emigrated to Israel in 1984 and is the Nephesh Theatre's artistic director. "When you are from Winnipeg, which is such a great place, life is all about getting out and proving yourself."

Einstein not only explores Albert Einstein's scientific theories and highlights his prodigious sense of humour but chronicles the conflicts that raged within him as he wrestled with his beliefs as a pacifist, a Zionist and a universalist and his competing responsibilities as a husband and father.

"From little idea or attachment to being Jewish, he became of of the biggest Zionists," Rypp said of a play that has been described by critics as a drama with comedy. "He lived the Holocaust and the A-bomb. These events touched him profoundly.

"You get lots of insights into the world by contemplating Einstein's dilemmas. He was a pacifist who faced hard choices."

The play is set in the early 1950s at Princeton, where the great physicist, then about to turn 70, had found refuge 20 years earlier from the outrages of Hitler and the Nazis. It occurs after Ben Gurion offered and Einstein turned down the presidency of Israel.

Einstein was written and first performed in English in Canada 20 years ago.

Its revival in Winnipeg comes after performances in Hebrew and English this year by Victor Attar at a science museum in Isreal to commemorate the UN-backed World Year of Physics and Einstein's pioneering contribution to this field, and the 100th anniversary of Einstein's brilliant paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which outlined his Theory of Relativity.

"The playwright has allowed me a trip from Einstein's early childhood, when he couldn't talk and 'People thought I was retarded,' to late in life when he realizes that he had not listened to his two wives and a son who had died," Attar said, slipping in and out of character during an interview by telephone from New York.

"It picks on all the criticisms that Einstein had of his own life and then, near the end, there is an agonizing period when he questions what he accomplished. His entire life had been investigating and explaining science, and only when he reached his seventies did he realize his life had problems."

Each performance was a voyage of discovery for Attar as well as those seated in front of him, said the actor, who emigrated to Israel from Iraq when he was 14.

"Audiences are very curious about Einstein," the former Baghdadi said. "They realize he was a great scientist but they do not realize that even beautiful genuises to the bathroom as we all do.

"There is a lesson for all of us in this play. Great thinkers make mistakes, too. They may contribute so much in one way, but they are often in search of something else."

Einstein is playing this week at Princeton and will be performed on Dec. 3 in Saskatoon. After the two shows in Winnipeg, where Attar seemed terribly concerned about the possibility of extremely cold weather, the play will begin a short off-Broadway run at La MaMa Theatre.

"Einstein is a Jew for Israelis, one of us," Attar said. "An Israeli audience is most interested in the details of Einstein's personality.

"When I perform this play in English the audience is not so interested in his Jewishness, but the scientific side of his life. What went on inside his head. Ofcourse I may have a different opinion about that after appearing before Winnipeg audiences in Hebrew and English."

© National Post 2005