Another Color for the Flowers

By: Avraham Oz. Directed by: Meir Ben Simon. Set design: Zohar Almaliah. Costume design: Rona Mishol. Participants: members of the Tafsis theater group. The play takes place in 1916 at the Craiglockhart military hospital in Scotland, where soldiers suffering from shell shock are hospitalized. At the center of the drama are two war poets - Captain Siegfried Sassoon and the young Lieutenant Wilfred Owen - who meet in the recovery ward and develop a complex emotional and poetic bond that spills over into erotic undertones. Alongside them stand two nurses - Ruth, older and from the lower class, and Debbie, a young aristocratic volunteer - reflecting the class and gender gaps of the era. The play weaves original songs together with adaptations of Owen's and Sassoon's works, and deals with courage, betrayal, love, and moral responsibility in wartime. Moments of confrontation between pacifist and nationalist voices are interlaced with tenderness, pain, and humor. The drama reaches its climax with Owen's death just days before the armistice, and with the remaining characters' disillusionment with the hope that "the war to end all wars" would put an end to the horrors. The play explores the power of poetry in the face of human helplessness - and the need for yet another "color" for the flowers of death.