Comedy Theater — The Suicide — the best comedy of the 20th century! Based on the play by Nikolai Erdman

Cast: Semyon Ronkin, Olga Belenkaya, Marina Ostrovskaya, Leonid Tkachuk, Andrey Izuchayev, Irina Shapira, Leonid Semyonov, Moshe Galitsky, Tatyana Kaplunovskaya, Ksenia Gantselevich, Yevgenia Yermanenok, Anna Sahara, and others

Director: Semyon Ronkin, the theater’s artistic director
Production team: Svetlana Muravyova, Mira Chizhova, Elena Tkachuk, Vladimir Grin

The Comedy Theater—then called the Aliyah and Comedy Theater—opened in Kfar Saba in 2004 with Nikolai Erdman’s brilliant play The Suicide.

Erdman’s comedy is relevant—and perhaps especially relevant—today: in any place and time where people are concerned with the problems of existence and nonexistence, the relationship between the individual and society, material poverty, and spiritual impoverishment.

Yes, this is not merely—and not even primarily—a “journey into the recent past of the Soviet Union,” but also a topical, timely, and very, very funny story about the most important problems of our lives.

Despite the play’s serious themes, it contains a great deal of humor, satire, and irony. Most importantly, everything that happens on stage is vivid and joyful!

For Israel’s Comedy Theater, this play is a kind of Seagull, since The Suicide was the theater’s first production in 2004. Over the years, the theater has presented numerous comedies “of all genres, eras, and nations,” but from time to time it returns to new versions of this great play.

In 2018, the eighth version of the Israeli theater’s production was performed to great acclaim at the Taganka Theater of Drama and Comedy, on that very stage where Vysotsky, Filatov, Demidova, and others performed, in that very theater where, at Yury Lyubimov’s invitation, Nikolai Erdman himself served on the Artistic Council.

In 2025, audiences will see the eleventh version of this brilliant play, featuring both veterans of the Comedy Theater—three performers appeared in this production 21 years ago—and theater newcomers: graduates of the theater’s studio and professional actors who are very recent immigrants.

“Whatever century we may be in, the same bustle and turmoil…
Nothing in this world is dearer to us than our own native belly…
And though faces keep flashing around us again—friends, neighbors, ladies in all their finery—
In this world we are all suicides, in one sense—absolutely everyone…”