Abraham B. Yehoshua

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A Touch of Madness in the Plays of A. B. Yehoshua

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[Yehoshua] brings to his plays a knack for structural compactness, for manipulation of character and for creating a sense of an impending turning point. All these dramatic commodities are dynamically galvanized by a dialogue that rapidly alternates between poignant staccato utterances and a kind of lingering meditative lyricism. Using a dramatic strategy similar to that of Pinter in The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, Yehoshua gradually builds up a situation fraught with emotional tension that is abruptly discharged in a fierce dialogue by characters engaged in a series of interpersonal confrontations. Unlike Pinter's characters, however, who openly display an impulse toward wanton destructiveness, Yehoshua's dramatis personae often hide under the garb of urbane civility. Though not possessed by death, Yehoshua the playwright seems to enjoy depicting the emerging skull beneath the skin of his characters. Minutely exploring the tortuous contours of their psychic landscape, Yehoshua presents his characters as they abruptly vacillate between realism and fantasy. Out of joint with their immediate environment, they are either wearing an apocalyptic chip on their shoulders or else are hopelessly entangled in a psychological labyrinth. His [is a] predilection for the unique and the weird…. Yehoshua is at his best when engaging his characters in the game of psychological brinksmanship, pushing them to the extreme edge of their endurance. (pp. 198-99)

The compression of time and space [in "A Night in May"] functions as a catalyst to advance a series of sharp confrontations between the characters, whose latent conflicts are exposed in a nervous exchange of verbal fencing…. By the time the play has reached its climactic point in the middle of the third act, the emotionally wrought-up characters have spent themselves in a night of frenzied verbal combat. When the first rays of the Jerusalem dawn break through the window, the play makes its final movement, and the characters drift apart in the same casual manner in which they originally came together. Yehoshua seems to have steered his characters to the abyss of their existence only to leave them there at the end.

In "A Night in May" Yehoshua's narrative impulse still prevails over his dramatic craftsmanship. The play achieves a unity of atmosphere and being, but somewhat at the expense of a unity of action and doing. Or to put it in another way, Yehoshua enacts the dramatic events in a sequence of time not fully incorporated into the spatial form of the play. As a result of this, the language of the play is presented through dialogue that is not simultaneously embodied in the visual stage properties and images, or those elements that create a true theatrical experience.

Whereas in "A Night in May" the interaction between the verbal and visual components is rather loose, in "Last Treatments," written in 1973, word, image, gesture and stage props become orchestrated in a sequence of carefully timed events. Consequently, the characters presented are defined not in terms of their beings but in the way their beings manifest themselves in the process of action. Thus, the focal interest of the play shifts from a state of being to a dynamic situation of events.

As the plot unfolds, two opposing movements emerge: one strains toward severing the past from the future, and the other toward breaking away from the present into the past. The two movements form the fundamental conflict of the play, which materializes in the figures of Herman and Schatz….

Yehoshua manages to establish a visual extension of the verbal constituencies. By means of an amazingly concise dialogue whose verbal images merge with the visual, the effect of total theatre is achieved. (p. 199)

Just as Schatz cannot escape from the realities of the present into the past, so too Herman is unable to escape from the past into the future….

Yehoshua pushes his characters to the very edge of the abyss in his relentless probing of their ability to endure moments of intense crisis. In the process, he leads his characters through an intricate maze in their search for meaning. Since their attempts to find meaning, according to the inner logic of the play, are doomed to failure, the characters move frenetically, in a vicious circle of trial and error, either unable or unwilling to achieve any real breakthrough. By using his dramatic powers to present man at the extreme edge of his existence, searching for meaning that constantly eludes him, Yehoshua has captured that mood or sensibility associated with the modern vision. Yehoshua's artistic vision inevitably turns, then, from a surface representation of Israeli reality in order to communicate an existential experience by means of spatial and temporal forms. In achieving this more profound sense of reality on stage, Yehoshua's work clearly signifies a landmark in the development of modern Hebrew dramaturgy. (p. 200)

Eli Pfefferkorn, "A Touch of Madness in the Plays of A. B. Yehoshua," in Books Abroad (copyright 1977 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 51, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 198-200.

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