Cast, in order of appearance:
Old man: Joseph Carmon
Old woman: Zaharirah Charifai
Coachman: Itzhak Heskia
Prostitute with a mole: Florence Bloch
Prostitute with a beauty spot: Sigalit Fuchs
Doctor: Shabtai Konorti
Ballsy drunk: Gaby Amrany-Gur
Drunk with zucchini: Shimon Mimran
Happy cherub: Dror Keren
Funny cherub: Alon Neuman
Sad cherub: Dina Blei
The mother: Sandra Schonwald
The hovel for the old: Simon Kricheli
Horse: Yossi Rachmane
The doctor's house: Roman Kricheli
A tree: Shay Feinberg
Black men: Tal Ben-Bina, Shani Treisman, Irit Bashan, Ronit Zlotin 
Singer: Keren Hadar

Musicians:

Piano and keyboards: Yossi Ben-Nun
Mandolin/guitar: Shmuel Elbaz
Double bass: Avner Yifat
Trombone: Shuki Wolfus

Production managers: Iris Credi, Avraham Zouri
Assistant director: Karin Sigal
Lighting: Shmuel Atmazgi
Sound: Sharon Barak
Wardrobe: Sarah Cohen, Hagit Habut
Props: Ziona Zaken-Barak

Premiere: 19 March 1999
Length of the performance: approx. 1 hour 30 minutes, with no interval

The Cameri Theatre

The Cameri Theatre was founded in 1944. At that time it was still owned by an artistic council. Since 1971 it has operated as Tel Aviv's municipal theatre. It is currently run by a board consisting of figures in public life, intellectuals and theatre artists, headed by Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv-Yaffo.
The theatre has a number of locations: the Cameri Theatre in Dizengoff Street, the ZOA house, the Tsavta Hall, the Dohl Hall in Tel Aviv's Hatikva district, and the Anis Hall in Yaffo.
The Cameri puts on six or seven plays a year.
The eighty-strong company includes some of Israel's best actors, who work with both Israeli and foreign directors. So far four of the actors have been awarded the Israel Prize for their exceptional contribution to theatre. The Cameri has developed a prestigious international reputation, representing the country at important festivals and touring in the best theatres in the world.
The theatre has always considered it its duty to encourage the writing and performing of new Israeli plays. In addition to contemporary works dealing with the country's most pressing social, moral and political problems, there are also classical plays in the Cameri repertoire, especially ones whose themes still resonate today. The Comedy of Errors, as directed by Omri Nitzan - which won the prize for best comedy of the year - takes place in Beirut as it suffers bombardment.
The Society of Friends of the Cameri Theatre, which has members at home and abroad, supports a wide range of the theatre's activities, and takes direct part in some of its projects. One such project was the "Peace Summit", as a part of which young Israelis and Palestinians met in Tel Aviv to see one of the Cameri's performances together.
The theatre's director Noam Semel was formerly director of Haifa Municipal Theatre and cultural attaché in the United States.
Artistic director Omri Nitzan was previously artistic director of Haifa Municipal Theatre, the Habima Theatre and the Israel Festival in Jerusalem.

Writer and director:

"Hanoch Levin, who has died aged 55 of cancer, was Israel's most prolific and controversial playwright whose dark comedies of great psychological insight and poetry both shocked and entranced his audiences. He wrote 56 plays, of which 34 were produced, the majority of those at the Cameri Theatre, in his home city of Tel Aviv.
His first two plays were scorching satires. You, Me And the Next War (1968), staged in a tiny Tel Aviv club, criticised Israeli smugness after the 1967 war and predicted that such an attitude would lead to another war. His next play, the Queen of The Bathtub (1970), lampooned the then prime minister, Golda Meir, and included such absurd characters as "Lord Keeper of the Enema". Performed at the Cameri, it created uproar. The government threatened to withdraw the theatre's subsidy and, after 18 performances, the play was closed.
[Outside his homeland, Levin is a less well-known playwright; few of his plays have been translated. They are performed at festivals abroad in Hebrew. Murder, which deals with the seemingly never-ending differences between Arabs and Jews, was a great success at the 1998 Parma Festival.]
Levin's plays are anything but overtly political. Yet they are still rooted in Israeli society.
Levin's major concern for the past 15 years was with death, both physical and spiritual. From Everyone Wants to Live (1985) to his last work, Requiem, the message is that we might want to live, but there is no chance whatsoever. So the characters, who once did all they could to remain alive, come to accept death.
Levin's poetic style reached its peak with Requiem, written when the playwright knew his own death was close. (...) [It's] the first of Levin's plays in which his characters actually embrace death instead of trying to run away from it. Old people and young people, whores and drunkards, all on the verge of death, desperately seek some solace in life. But here there is no sense of aggravation or contempt, so much as a sort of a complicity with life and even more so with death.
[In 1999 Requiem won the prize for best play of the year. The production also won a further five awards: Yitzhak Hizkiya for best supporting actor, Rakefet Levy for best costumes, Shay Yehuday for best lighting, Hanoch Levin for best author plus, shared, for best director.]
Born in Tel Aviv to Polish parents, Levin studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. He lived a modest and somewhat reclusive life and after the controversy surrounding The Queen of the Bathtub refused to give interviews. He once told me that he saw no role for them; he said everything he wanted to through his plays. The rest was silence."
(Excerpts from Michel Ajzenstadt's obituary in The Guardian, 27 August 1999)

"At the opening of the play, an old man, a coffin-maker by trade, bemoans the fact that making a living is hard because people are in no hurry to die. This is the essential metaphor of Hanoch Levin's new drama. Death and humour are bound together here and it is funny to the point of tears.

Levin employs three specific parts taken from three Chekhov stories, but this is not adaptation of dramatization: it is a matter of identification. We see the monotony of life and its lack of meaning, we see not only its lack of purpose, but also why the opportunities it offers are missed. As the old man says, 'Life has passed with no profit and without pleasure. It is lost'"
(Elyakim Yaron, Ma'ariv)

"Levin recounts this story about death as if it were a lesson from the Bible: the characters wear old Russian clothes, but what surrounds them is bare, not at all poetic, and their movements are characteristically concentrated. This is a happy meeting of commedia dell' arte and minimalist theatre.
The method of story-telling and the performances are continuously influencing each other. The leading players are an old couple. Dad has a bad knee, and stands in front of us with his back hunched. He is a coffin-maker, and has got used to the fact that death means business. Mum makes her rounds about the house, always in a hurry. All of a sudden she stops - "it's feeling poorly, " he says. The whole of our lives is captures by this simple moment. They take the car to the medic; "it's all just something to spend money on," he whinges. Then his wife dies, and three sad cherubs, looking bedraggled with their unkempt wings, take her away, telling her soothing stories. The vision of heaven is this simple.
The old man does not know whether to account for his wife's coffin as income or expenditure. Now he realises that behind all her caring was love, which he never reciprocated with any kindness. He goes out to find the tree in autumn she used to dream about. He finds a young woman with a baby. The baby dies. The old man puts his hands out to the girl for her to put her head in and weep away her tears. Innumerable compassionate dialogues hide unsaid behind this simple gesture. This second story carries on almost unnoticeably from the first.
The third story is told by the coachman. It is about the death of his son, and he has no one to tell it to except his horse, because his passengers are too busy with their own happiness: on the outward journey they are whores, on the way back peasants, all have that same happy look in their eyes. "There are other things, you know, a little culture, a little theatre, a few little thesps", says one; "the little thesps want the same as the rest" is the other's riposte. The coach of life moves on. When the old man dies, he realises that his life has been a waste, and he dreams of the times spent with his wife when they were still in love. By the end we see the living and the dead dancing in a never-ending circle. A swan flies above us, and the curtain drops like an eyelid.
From the three short stories Levin has created world theatre in miniature, which grabs the viewer with its poetic thought, its visual simplicity, its atmospheric live music, the fantastic leading players and, of course, the magic quality of the material."
(Andreas Berger, Braunschweiger Zeitung, 10 July 2000)