Back in the U.S.S.R.

Actually, it's not the u.s.s.r. despite the high number of pre-dissolution soviet union immigrants. I'm back in Israel. But my moody frame of reference is Beatles,(or" The Beatles...luv" as Lennon would say) after reading an old rollings stones article about the bands breakup.

This morning I saw a play in Jaffa at the Geshem theatre written by Pinter, called "The Birthday Party". The hebrew script was pretty simple so I didn't have any problem following. But, I found it depressing and irksome. It was about a pianist who wakes up in a boarding house and nothing makes any sense to him and it seems like he's entered a Kafkaesque world where he keeps blinking to wake up and remains glued to the incomprehensible. He's forced to celebrate a strange birthday, when he denies it's his birthday and then two strange men show up to collect him for abandoning the fold which the audience is never privy to information about. The relationships Pinter created seem to me to be awkward and the dark violent undercurrent would have caused me to lose interest if I hadn't needed to pay such close attention to the words so I could translate back to english in my mind.

In the car on the way back home, my boyfriends father, an actor who's renowned in Israel, tried to engage me in conversation about it as it's one of his favourite plays. He's a huge Kafka fan as I am, but I couldn't really connect to where the playwright Pinter took this.