The human tragedy of exile is presented here in the gloomy corner of a dank basement. Each of the characters has his own reason for leaving his homeland. The farm laborer came to make money; he is wily and practical, and exploits the dreaminess of the intellectual to eat, drink and smoke away his possessions. He is in no way capable of grasping the intellectual’s world; he doesn’t understand why this man would go to such pains to write about the world of filth. “What’s it good for?” he asks. The laborer refuses to be convinced by the writer’s catechisms; “People need truth,” claims the author. “Not a disgusting one like yours,” he replies.
Both actors excel in their acting, both in their isolation and in their subjugation, each to his respective social class. Avinoam Mor-Chaim plays the laborer with all his idiocy and cunning, all within the narrow and intimate frame of two roommates living together in a basement. He is prepared to defend the property he has gathered to the death. Yet when his enslavement is made clear to him in words – “The more money you have, the more you will want. The years will go by and you will still postpone the moment of your return, you will carry on working and saving…” – at that moment he almost loses his mind, and then from some place his yearning for rootedness is kindled and rises up.
Shabtai Konorti, who plays the intellectual, manages to roll with utterly convincing ease into the part he is representing. He knows in overwhelming detail the anatomy of loneliness; he knows how to speak himself. At first glance he appears to be motivated by a sense of vocation to write a book about the enslaved state of man, but in reality he himself is captive, within a magic circle of his own creation. In his flight from his communist homeland he has ceased to be a slave, but in the land of freedom he has lost the ideal of liberty: the subject has lost its importance.