Politics of life and death decided by a handshake

Published on Sunday 7 October 2007 01:54

'I'VE never auditioned in my life," says David Levin, 72, former artistic director of Israel's Habima National Theatre, who settled in Edinburgh with his Scottish wife last year after a career that has taken him all over the world. "If you were an actor I would observe how you walk in, if your handshake is strong, if you lean towards your coffee or take the coffee to you. I would ask a very embarrassing private question to see how you would react. I'm looking for personality."

It sounds like a precarious method, but it has never let him down through half a century in the business. It's the way he found his cast for Antigone, the Sophocles tragedy which is the centrepiece of the autumn programme at Glasgow's Tron Theatre. He has given the title role to the unknown Hannah Donaldson, a recent graduate of the RSAMD who has also been cast as a reporter in the forthcoming Rebus: The First Stone, as well as landing a year-long place as a graduate trainee at Dundee Rep.

"The way people react tells me something about their defence mechanism, their energy and their openness," says Levin, right, who has asked the 23-year-old to chop off her own hair to play the part.

"By that, I can know much about a person - as much as I want to know. I wanted Antigone to be not a heroine, but a simple girl. I didn't want a beautiful girl with a fantastic figure because it is the situation that turns her into what she becomes."

Acting alongside established performers, Donaldson plays a young woman determined to bury her brother despite the edict of the king. First performed nearly 2,500 years ago, the play encapsulates the eternal tension between moral and civic duty.

Antigone's determination to do right by her brother even if it means defying the law echoes a conflict that has been recognised down the ages from conscientious objectors to poll tax defaulters, and Levin is adamant that audiences should be alive to the play's political ramifications.

"Theatre is a political act," explains the director, who translated Antigone himself. "All Greek drama is about society and politics. You can't disconnect great drama from politics."

Levin is well-versed in politics. Born in Poland in 1935, his family emigrated to Tel Aviv when he was eight months old and he has rarely known anything but conflict. "In 1936 I have a recollection of the neighbourhood where my parents lived where the Arabs started a pogrom," he says. "There was more trouble in 1939, then there was the Second World War and we had Italian planes over Tel Aviv. 1948 was the independence war, 1956 was the Sinai war, 1973 was the Six-Day war, then the Gulf war. As a person who has been through major crises in his life to do with danger, I tell people round here they live in a paradise."

Levin spent two years in his early 20s as an assistant director at London's Royal Court before returning home to run the Israeli National Theatre for six years. At the age of 50, he moved to London to develop his international career.

Now in his 70s, the director finds stimulation in the pace and new opportunities of Edinburgh. "London became too big," he says. "I had stopped chasing the girls and stopped going to pubs. We decided to look for another place: it was either Tel Aviv or somewhere in Scotland. We came to Edinburgh for four days and after the second day I said: 'This is it.'"

• Antigone, Tron Theatre (0141-552 4267), Glasgow, Friday until October 27 www.tron.co.uk