Motti Lerner

From 1978 to 1984 he was a dramaturge and director at the Jerusalem Khan Theatre, where he directed his own play The princess and the Hobo, Gotcha by Barrie Keeffe, and Magic Afternoon by Wolfgang Bauer.

Motti Lerner is one of the pioneers of radical political theatre in Israel, and one of the country’s leading writers of documentary drama and television docudramas.

In 1997, The Municipal Theatre of Heilbronn, Germany, staged The Murder of Isaac, a play about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

His more controversial plays have been staged successfully in Europe and the US, including Coming Home, Pangs of the Messiah, The Murder of Isaac, and Benedictus.

In the postmodern world of shattering of forms and the sanctification of chaos, of ideological anti-structuralism, of ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’, Motti Lerner, in his writing for stage, screen, and television, is one of the last Mohicans who believe that the world can be rationalized and saved through art, that we must still execute the role of the theatre allotted to it by Hamlet in his monologue to the players: ‘to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’.

Therefore, Lerner’s ideational philosophy, as worded in essays, articles, interviews, and lectures, is strongly linked to its theatrical application.

This link is accurately reflected in a paragraph from a lecture given by Lerner – the most prominent neo-Aristotelian writer in Israeli drama – at the 2005 Jerusalem Conference: ‘Catharsis is the most profound and effective dramatic tool.