The Old Red Lion | ★★★★✩

You might reasonably think that there is enough absurdity in the world without inventing it. But one of Israel’s leading absurdist playwrights Hanoch Levin, who died in 1999 from cancer, was considered by many Israelis to be the antidote to the real world version when his plays burst onto the country’s stages in the 1960s and 70s.

To the revulsion of many Israelis Hanoch sometimes presented a view of Israel that was counter to the flattering narrative preferred by most Israelis in the wake of all-out war or
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

But here his grotesque comedy, given an east European makeover by Ukranian theatre company Gamayan, could be set anywhere, where there's a pharmacy and people are paralysed by greed and fear of risk. A chemist is run by Bella (Hadas Kershaw) who helps diffident Yohanan (Tom Dayton) buy the condoms he needs. She does this by seducing him with the promise of sex at her home where, if things go to plan, she can extract a marriage proposal and a cheque for his small fortune.
All this is to the frustration of the more smooth operator Shmuel (Joseph Emms) who has his own stock of condoms to offload. They were bequeathed to him by his late father like an
unwanted heirloom and now he’s saddled with the stock and sees in Yohanan a
possible buyer.

Always present is a stage and disco lights where these three unlikable characters perform Dimitry Saratsky’s crude songs of introspection like self obsessed karaoke singers before stepping back into the action. The men end up vying for the woman who is always one step ahead.
Asya Sosis’s production flaunts Levin’s sexual imagery and neatly pivots around his play’s unconventional form. There is a bit of Pirandello here — where Emm’s Shmuel derides the audience for witnessing all his disappointment and discomfort without ever letting it touch them — and a bit of Godot-like Beckett there.
Like many a fine play you leave with an uncomfortable sense of mortality, which may or may not be a recommendation.