‘A mix of vaudeville and David Lynch’: the hit play a few massive rabbit on a psychoanalyst’s sofa

Two years in the past, Deborah Levy got here throughout a cool animated film that sparked her creativeness. It featured a Freud-like determine sitting reverse a rabbit on an analyst’s sofa. Levy, a three-times Booker nominated novelist and award-winning writer of nonfiction, had started her occupation as a playwright however had no longer written a script for 25 years till she got here around the symbol. “As soon as I saw it,” she says, “I heard dialogue in my mind: a conversation, a serious, difficult conversation between a professor and a rabbit, about contemporary anxiety. I knew it was a play,” says Levy.

The premise would possibly appear absurd however this is exactly the purpose – absurdism is some way of coping with issues that experience proved, within the wider global, divisive or even explosive to discuss. Because the two-hander features a rabbit, it makes house for humour, for misunderstandings.

The play that got here out of that impulse, 50 Minutes, had a sold-out run at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich previous this 12 months and could have its 2d run subsequent month. The drama takes position over a therepeutic hour and explores – in English, somewhat than German – the entirety from nervousness and panic to the apprehensive silence round a subject deemed taboo, albeit it all in metaphorical or approximate tactics.

Levy’s subtitle for this paintings is “The War War, Jaw Jaw, Bunny Play” and the rabbit pointedly speaks of aggression, concern and violence: “A fox can kill four generations of my family,” he says, “but he cannot kill my desire to be free.”

While Levy used to be writing the play, the arena looked to be shifting in opposition to a story of struggle, she says. “I didn’t want to pin the play on one conflict, though of course Gaza and Ukraine were on my mind, it’s more about a collective feeling of immense unease, queasiness, disbelief, shock, uncertainty, fear and sadness. So Rabbit was going to be put to work as the transmitter of all of this.”

It obviously resonates with audiences: its first run required additional seating within the auditorium to house the giant call for, with audiences sitting alongside the steps when the seats ran out. Levy used to be there and relished feeling the thrill within the room. “On the first night,” she says, “sitting alone in the dark with the audience, I thought I might have a heart attack. After all, I am not in the same room as my readers when they throw my books at the wall, or when they laugh or cry at something on the page.”

Starring Susanne Sachsse as Professor, and Hauke Heumann as Rabbit, the drama is each a playful and unsettling enjoy to look at. It comprises tune and dance (the choreography is designed to resemble the dance series in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders, says Levy). The play’s aesthetic chimes with Levy’s liking for European avant-garde theatre, she says, however influences past it additionally come with “a mix of vaudeville and David Lynch”.

There is a layered set, suggesting rooms off-stage, along a sofa and Dali-esque lobster imagery. Heumann wears a rabbit masks and vapes once in a while whilst Sachsse cuts an androgynous determine in a go well with and tells her consumer that he will have to say no matter involves thoughts. The rabbit duly speaks about intruding ideas, which might be concurrently other-worldly and of our global, He tells the professor of his concern of sugar and provides: “I must stop scrolling the news.”

Despite Levy’s early occupation operating for the Royal Shakespeare Company amongst others, and serving because the inventive director of the Man Act theatre corporate, a thorough initiative primarily based in Cardiff, she needed to get used to the medium once more. “It took me a few weeks to get into the flow of the writing,” she says. “At first the words on the page were a bit tight, too didactic, not free enough. Then I started to understand its rhythm and structure.”

The play used to be commissioned by means of Tine Milz, Theater Neumarkt’s outgoing co-artistic director, who first met Levy in Rome in 2023. They mentioned a collaboration and Levy despatched Milz the cool animated film quickly after. “She said this could be the basis for our project,” says Milz. “From that point on, we thought about what the professor and the rabbit’s discussion could be. We talked about world politics and art … but mainly about a world that is fucked.”

Most of all, Milz sought after a work that will deal with the present sense of unease. “There is a crack in our world and a panic – a sense, in Europe certainly, that the peaceful times are over. But it’s panic combined with a feeling of numbness – that ‘I can’t do anything so maybe I’ll just party or look away because I’m completely overwhelmed.’” Milz, who’s German-born and a part of a trio of feminine inventive administrators at Theater Neumarkt, hopes to excursion the play throughout Europe.

It is related to all that is happening around the continent, she displays, from the upward thrust of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany to the election of right-wing top minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy to the post-Brexit panorama in the United Kingdom.

It is the obligation of theatre, she provides, to interrogate tough topics, even supposing she is seeing rising censorship in some quarters of her business. “I feel in the world of the arts that people are not talking with each other any more because they have different opinions on things, but I think that’s a problem. We can disagree on a lot of things but we have to continue talking and trying to understand each other.” This play, in what it says but in addition in its gaps and its opacities, is making an attempt to breach distinction and in addition spotlight it, she suggests, with, as Levy says, “something that is both painfully real and subversively absurd”.