Suicide

Featuring Semyon Ronkin, Olga Belenkaya, Marina Ostrovskaya, Leonid Tkachuk, Andrey Izuchayev, Irina Shapira, Leonid Semyonov, Moshe Galitsky, Tatyana Kaplunovskaya, Ksenia Gantselevich, Evgenia Ermanenok, Anna Sahara, and others.

Direction: Semyon Ronkin, the theatre’s artistic director
Stage work: Svetlana Muravyova, Mira Chizhova, Elena Tkachuk, Vladimir Grin

Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide, a brilliant work, became the opening production of the Comedy Theatre (formerly the Theatre of Aliyah and Comedy) in Kfar Saba in 2004.

Over time, Erdman’s comedy has not lost its relevance and remains in demand in any era and place where people are concerned with questions of existence and non-existence, the relationship between the individual and society, material difficulties, and spiritual poverty.

Importantly, this is not only an image through which to understand the recent past of the Soviet Union, but also a topical, incisive, and highly engaging examination of the fundamental questions of our lives. Despite the serious issues raised in the play, it is full of humor, satire, and irony—and everything on stage unfolds in a vivid and cheerful manner!

For the Israeli Comedy Theatre, this play has become something like The Seagull, since The Suicide opened the theatre’s first season in 2004. Over the years, the theatre has presented numerous comedies from different eras and in various styles, but from time to time it returns to new adaptations of this great play.

In 2018, the eighth version of the Israeli Theatre’s production was performed with great success at the Taganka Theatre of Drama and Comedy, where Vysotsky, Filatov, Demidova, and others once performed—and where Nikolai Erdman was invited to the Artistic Council at the suggestion of Y. P. Lyubimov.

In 2025, audiences will see the eleventh version of this play. The production will feature both veterans of the Comedy Theatre and theatre newcomers—graduates of its studio and professional actors who have recently arrived.

“Whatever the time may be here, it is still the same bustle and trouble… And nothing is dearer to us than our familiar everyday life… And let familiar faces flash around us once again—friends, neighbors, elegantly dressed ladies—we are suicides in this world, in a certain sense, every one of us…”