On Alienation in Hanoch Levin's Theatre of Protest

The subject of this paper is alienation as a poetic issue and its expression in Hanoch Levin's "theatre of protest." The first part of the article is devoted to the definition of the concepts "theatre of protest"—drama which has a subversive ideological message conveyed through poetic innovation—and "alienation"—the feeling of dis-empathy felt by the audience, and directed at a) the world presented on the stage, b) the "implied playwright," and c) the playwright himself. In the second part of the article several aspects of alienation (thematic, stylistic, rhetorical) will be examined in Hanoch Levin's "plays of protest" (Execution, Everybody Wants to Live). An attempt will be made to show how such plays undermine the basic assumptions of the traditional Aristotelian poetics of drama and demonstrate their "revolutionary" nature, in both the ideological and aesthetic sense of the term (Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre).