Theatre critique: “Oh God”
Anticipation, the phenomenon in which one of the actors on stage responds even before the former finished speaking, someone once explained to me, is a problem, “a bug.” But in the case of “Oy Elohim” (“Oh God“) – a play by Anat Gov in the Cameri Theatre – the two actors, who wish to deliver some message to the audience, mostly manage to deliver the feeling they came for their shift and they would do anything they can to finish it as soon as possible.
After the spectators sit in their comfortable chairs to have their cultural portion, Yossi Polack and Sarah von Schwartze go on stage and pass about 70 minutes flinging reproaches at each other. Pollack plays the role of frustrated God coming to a therapy at the home clinic of the secular neurotic psychologist played by von Schwartze, only to find out he exists in the shadow of his creatures more than they in his image.
He complains about losing his powers, and she complains that he disappeared. Together they come to realize that both of them, the man and his God, has created the other simply to save himself from loneliness.
It’s difficult to avoid employing this conclusion on the relationship between the theatre creators and the audience. Setting the whole play in such a static situation on the distant stage creates an alienating effect. Naturally, when the actors rarely move, the stage is completely empty of any energies, and a loud cry or a rolling laughter wouldn’t help. And when the two actors fire-rapid shoot their replicas one at another, and mostly at the spectators, this is no longer that anticipation issue, but contempt towards the audience. The mechanic and artificial acting might fit rehearsals – it’s likely that one could much better identify with the characters if the two veteran and accomplished actors were playing chess.
But more than anything, the play’s happenings scene brings up the question whether such a story fits a theatre stage. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that a lot more people would watch the theatrical, cinematic or radiophonic versions rather than reading it as a book. After all, in the immediate satisfaction generation – it’s much more comfortable. But what advantage does the theatre stage actually hold over other artistic platforms in this case? In the current form of the play, there is no justification for that. The psychological therapy situation, which might work on TV or on film, thanks to a larger variety of artistic methods, doesn’t necessarily work on stage.
In favor of the play, however, it should be mentioned that it excels with investigation and wittiness. Gov brings up fresh ideas in this context, even if the preference for framing the relations between the Jewish people and its god within the distant biblical era is quite distinctive, as well as the abstention from major debates raised in the new era, and a especially regarding the holocaust – a topic that probably wouldn’t have integrated in the poetic irony interwoven in the play, as part of the secular quibble. In conclusion, it is a philosophical amusing experiment which tries using Socrates’ dialectic dialogue in order to make the Jewish God take responsibility over his so-called wrongdoings, more than producing insights that could be implemented for things between man and man.
