Cameri Theater celebrates 80th anniversary with plans for new production season

The Cameri Theater, which is marking its 80th anniversary, unveiled its next season’s planned productions last week.

Troupe members, directors, and ushers wore black tees with a red fourscore figure shaped like a ribbon calling for the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas since October 7. “These remind us: Everything is for those who were kidnapped,” Cameri Artistic Director Gilad Kimchi said. 

“Those who founded this country knew that being a people means having a culture,” Kimchi said, quoting the late education and culture minister, Shulamit Aloni.

“We are entering an age of peace, in which cultural and theater heroes will play a vital role,” Aloni said when the theater marked its 50th year and the Oslo Accords were new. 

“Every evening, we say: ‘Until this moment, murder! Starting from tomorrow – peace!’” Ola Schur Selektar said during a mini-performance taken from Those Unborn Lose – a new production based on the works of Hanoch Levin."

Why: People long so much to live life, they do not live it!”

Guests were shown a short film lauding the rich history of the Cameri Theater. Among the thespian factoids included were that Levin is neck-to-neck with Shakespeare concerning number of plays produced (40 each) and that the longest-performing actor in the troupe is Yitzhak Hizkiya.

Filled with inner jokes, Hizkiya entered the filmed scene and wondered if now might be a good moment to list each production he was in (there were 94) and received a polite decline. Miriam Zohar also stole the spotlight for a moment.

“What are you filming?” she asked.

After being informed this is to mark the 80th anniversary of the theater, she waved the cameraman away dismissively.

“Come see me when we mark 90 years,” said the 1931-born actress.

Zohar stars inChilbot (Bitches), a new comedy about a rivalry between a stage diva (Zohar) and a younger actress (Maya Landsman). The two performed a dialog from the play in which Zohar attempted to read her lines from King Lear before scoffing at the abrasive younger woman.

Shakespeare hits the stage 

SHAKESPEARE’S HENRY V will hit the stage next year with Tom Avni playing the lead role. Avni noted that the young monarch begins the play as a pleasure-seeking youth but becomes “the sort of leader we would wish to have.”

“He is loved by his people because he tells them the truth,” Avni said. “He fights the war himself, in the front, not commanding people from war-rooms, and he learns the blood-cost of war.”

Actor Dvir Benedek will perform the leading role in The Whale. “I don’t know why they cast me of all people for this role,” he joked and the audience laughed in appreciation.

Benedek, who played a Sumo wrestler in the 2009 film A Matter of Size, had bariatric surgery done which led to him shedding 63 kg.

“I was never as big as Charlie,” the obese main character in The Whale weighing 300 kg, “but 150 kg. is enough to reach a point where one knows: I either accept help or die.”

“Every addiction,” Benedek told the audience, “needs someone willing to offer a rope rescue.”

IF LAUGHTER can serve as a rescue, readers may wish to pre-book tickets for the planned premiere of Rules for Living.

Adapted to Hebrew by Erez Drigues, it took ten years to get the English play by Sam Holcroft to the Cameri Theater. The plot revolves around a British family getting ready for Christmas as the audience is shown the various rules that guide the actions of each character.

“It deals with the often touched-upon subject of a family gathering,” Drigues told The Jerusalem Post, “but does so in a brilliant manner, the likes of which I have not seen often.”

Quoting Edith (Odeya Koren), who says in the play, “If we didn’t have rules there’d be anarchy,” Drigues told the Post it took some time to turn a Christmas feast in the UK to an Israeli Passover meal.

“If you want to see a family much worse than yours,” Koren joked with the audience, “come see this production.”

YORAM KANIUK’S Adam Resurrected, adapted to the theater in a now mythical 1990’s Gesher production held in a circus tent directed by Yevgeny Aryeh, is among the productions offered next year.

Irad Rubinstain will direct this new adaptation and Amos Tamam will play the role of Adam Stein, a great actor of the German stage forced into serving the Nazi officer, who was in control of his and his family’s life, as a dog – and later, as a concentration camp clown.

Writing in The Cameri: A Theatre of Time and Place, Ben-Ami Feingold noted with great care how luck and circumstances shape a theater more than even the loftiest of intentions.

Batya Lancet, a founding member of the theater, was asked to join when the other founding actors sat at the Tnuva dairy at the Central Bus Station. Avraham Ben-Yosef saw her walking down the street and invited her in.

Feingold rejected two myths about the Cameri: that it was the first to present living Hebrew on stage in contrast to an older, accent-influenced Hebrew, and that it was the first to offer a natural school of acting in contrast to more pathos-filled performances.

“The greatness of the theater art,” wrote Cameri actress Rachel Marcus, “is that it is the only one able to offer the wondrous combination of wisdom, sadness and beauty for each and every one, as if he or she were an entire nation – and to an entire nation as if it was but one person.”

Chilbot will premiere on Tuesday, October 15, at 8 p.m. Those Unborn Lose will be offered with English subtitles on Tuesday, November 5, at 9 p.m. Rules for Living will premiere on Friday, November 8, at 8:30 p.m. 

Each performance is NIS 220 per ticket. The Whale, Adam Resurrected, and Henry V will be offered during 2025 with precise dates to be released soon. The Cameri Theatre, 19 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard, Tel Aviv. Call (03) 606-0900 to book.