The Rubber Merchants: A Life Unlived
Over the past year Gamayun Theatre has been low key working on a play by a renowned Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin, The Rubber Merchants, an ironic comedy with songs about the dangers of always staying safe.
It started out as something to do during the endless lockdowns, myself and a couple of actors meeting on Zoom roughly twice a month and diving into the text in such detail that normally isn’t possible for the theatre industry in the UK, as it requires too much time dedicated solely to the table read. And boy, was it frustrating for our actors.
However, as a director, I always had bigger plans for this: to take it to the stages of London and tour it in the country and internationally. Now that the theatres and festivals are tentatively opening up again, we are finally setting the gears in motion. As you might have seen on our website, we are looking for a set and costume designer, stage manager and some other jobs, necessary for the production. We are in talks with an amazing Ukrainian-Jewish composer for the brilliantly funny songs, written into the story, and we already have a choreographer, Gamayun Theatre’s Mariia Miasnikova and a guest sound designer, Olesya Stefannyk, who will take on a challenge of working on this production via Zoom, as the UK government is still not keen on visas in these uncertain times.
The story revolves around three people edging closer to the finish line of life. Yohanan, Bella, and Shmuel dream of all the usual things: sex, money, and love; but as they set out to get them, they discover that in order to make their dreams come true, they must inevitably take risks. The play was written by Hanoch Levin, who was an Israeli dramatist, theatre director and poet. His absurdist style is often compared to the works of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
But despite Levin’s high critical acclaim and great importance in the Israeli theatre of the 20th century, what does his play, The Rubber Merchants, have to do with our increasingly diverse and globalised society today?
To me this play unearths all of the fears I, and I imagine many others have about living in fear of life itself. What if poverty strikes? We are always constrained by our bank accounts, and by inability to govern our own finances. If not careful, I’m very aware that money can evaporate at any second, leaving me unable to not only live comfortably and work in the field I love, but also to take care of my family. Bella Berlow, in the play is an unmarried woman, stuck with a failing pharmacy, a legacy from her father, that she is desperate to keep afloat. But even more than that, she is burdened with all of her past experiences of men letting her down, taking advantage and never committing to share a life and its troubles with her. Now, at forty, she is losing hope in a happily ever after. She dreams of a full package: a man that will be wonderful and funny, great in bed and financially secure. But she will settle, if he demonstrates commitment straight away, in the form of a financial investment up front. Time is running out, after all.
But money isn’t everything one fears in life. What if you live your whole life secure, but never really doing anything you’ve dreamed about as a child? There were so many things: love, career, and of course, sex. Lots of sex. Once you commit to one vocation, or one person, all that infinite opportunity you have right now, will vanish, all other options will no longer be available. And, like Yohanan Tsingerbai fears, with commitment you will inevitably have to give up a part of yourself, to invest it all in one thing, and that’s just putting all your eggs in one basket. After all, he is still waiting for that feeling of confidence, of being the centre of the universe to arrive at some point. Maybe when he’s a little older. Maybe in his 60s. Life, after all, only begins when you’re 62.
And of course, we all fear rejection. To bare your soul in front of another person, be it in love or through your dedication to your vocation, and then to be smacked down, devalued, discounted is the worst kind of risk humans have to endure in life. No wonder, Shmuel Sproll fears it. He would rather live in a dream of selling all of his ten thousand packs of condoms that his father, comically left him in inheritance, and live a carefree life of sexual escapades in Texas, a land of plenty in his mind, than to tell a woman he loves of his feelings.
At the end of the day, our greatest fear, the one that encapsulates all others, is that of being alone. To live a life unloved, unappreciated and essentially, unlived. Somebody once told me, that each person lives in their own story, an archetypal narrative of sorts, that we can only break away from, once we consciously become aware of it. A fear of the life unlived is bound to become a self-fulfilling prophesy unless we find in ourselves the courage to face it.
The Rubber Merchants is a story about an ever-relevant topic. Lately, with the pandemic terrorising the world and endless lockdowns, masks on people’s faces wherever we go, other issues have gotten worse, such as depression, sense of isolation in world already too engrossed in virtual realities, domestic abuse… It has become essential to remind people that there’s dangers in safety, hidden in a false sense of security.