About the work
“LIEBE / Eine argumentative Übung” is a play by the Israeli playwright Sivan Ben Yishai, originally written in English as “LOVE/ An argumentative exercise” and translated into German by Maren Kames. It was written during Ben Yishai's time as house playwright at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, where Jakob Weiss directed the world premiere with five performers in the Studio Werkhaus in September 2019. The German version is published by Suhrkamp Theaterverlag and was printed in Theater heute in October 2019. The casting is open: several voices tell a seemingly private love story together.
Plot
Ben Yishai uses the comic-strip world of Popeye as a backdrop and moves his girlfriend Olive Oyl (Olivia Öl in German), usually a minor character, to the centre. Olivia is around forty, a successful novelist and a feminist; in a German language course she meets the younger Popeye, an unsuccessful filmmaker who also considers himself a feminist. Their relationship is marked by Olivia's fear of being left, by sexual mismatch, by Popeye's contact with an ex-girlfriend and his lack of interest in her books. In flashbacks her grandmother, mother and father speak up inside her head, and Olivia gradually gives up her own principles while her self-hatred grows.
Cultural significance
The play earned Sivan Ben Yishai a nomination for the Mülheim Dramatist Prize in 2020. Since its premiere it has been staged repeatedly, including at the Münchner Kammerspiele (2020), the Staatstheater Hannover (2023), Schauspiel Stuttgart (2024) and Schauspiel Leipzig (2026). Using comic means, the text exposes the blind spots of couples who consider themselves feminist and enlightened.