David Levin: Odyssey of our times

David Levin, Israel's greatest director, has waited all his life for the perfect 'Peer Gynt'. Now he's directing Ibsen's classic in London and its themes have never been more relevant, he tells Rhoda Koenig

A former clothing factory in the East End of London is a long way from the milieu of the first Peer Gynt that David Levin saw. "When I was in my twenties, I decided to spend a year in Scandinavia, for which I had always had an affinity, and I went to Oslo. I saw the director of the International Theatre Institute and asked him what I could see there. He said, 'Well, there is a play by Anouilh on at the moment, we have a company doing Oklahoma!...' I said, 'No, no! I came to Norway to see Ibsen!' So he got out the map and said: 'I'm afraid, then, you'll have to go up here.' So I saw my first Peer Gynt in a little town on the Finnish border, outdoors, under the midnight sun, and the whole place, everywhere you looked, was full of Lapps."

Levin has seen many other productions since, but none has matched the Peer Gynt he has imagined since first reading the play, in Hebrew, when he was 16. "There would be one good performance in this one, a good scene in that one, but I always felt detached from the play. When I would read the play – which I do every five or six years – I would find it full of passion, of humour, but when I saw it, I would ask myself, 'Where is it?'"

Now, after an aborted attempt in Belgrade seven years ago to get the play in his head on to the stage – "Milosevic interfered" – he is finally getting his chance at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, east London. The production will also be his first in England, although the director, who now works mainly on the Continent, has lived here for five years since marrying a Scottish recording-company executive. His previous 60 years were spent in Israel, although Levin says that he always considered himself a European "because I was born in Poland".

Levin is an expansive man. On being introduced, in the Arcola café, he replies to "How do you do, Mr Levin?" with "No, no! Already this is no good! Please! No 'Mr Levin!' David!" But his eating habits bespeak a wary childhood. After offering a visitor some of his apple strudel, he proceeds to leave it in its paper bag, reaching inside to break off pieces and quickly conveying them, covered by his hand, to his lips. "Of course I don't put it out on the table," he says. "A nice cake like this? Somebody sees it, they could steal it from me."

Levin's parents brought him to what was then Palestine in 1936, when he was a few months old. His first memory is of his mother lying on top of him to protect him from Arab gunfire during the war of independence. Levin's father never quite found his feet – "He did many things, none of them successfully" – and for some time Levin looked to be going the same way. "I almost never went to school," he says. But his truancy had a purpose: movie-mad, he would sneak into cinemas, taking a job as an ice-cream seller so he could see Olivier's Henry V 15 times. "You had to shout like in the market – 'ICE CREAM!'" he demonstrates.

Levin, who wanted to be an actor, finally got on to the stage during his required two-year military service. But the experience taught him that his place was behind the scenes – "People would laugh, whether I was supposed to be funny or not." On his release from the army, he began his directorial career, spending two years as an assistant director at the Royal Court ("You're around people like Tennessee Williams, Sean O'Casey – it's not so bad"), and eventually becoming artistic director of the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv.

That was an appointment with a lot of history behind it and a lot of trouble ahead. "The Habima was founded in Moscow in 1917. They would put on plays in Hebrew because they thought of themselves as the national theatre of Israel – 30 years before, of course, there was an Israel. The foundation was laid by Stanislavski – it was like being next to God. But when I took over, in 1978, the years before then had not been the best years for the theatre, which was a collective. I wanted to make changes – to open the door to new writers, new directors."

Not only were the Habima actors wedded to tradition; some had been with the theatre from the beginning. "They knew everything. I was the Young Turk, and there was nothing I could teach them. So that was quite a fight. The struggle was so great – it was the change of gods. I said afterward that when I came to the Habima I was tall and blond, and when I left [in 1985] I was" – Levin makes an expressive gesture – "small and grey."

The highly politicised atmosphere of Israeli culture also made life in the theatre difficult. "In 1969 my brother wrote a satire of the government, which I directed for the municipal theatre. From the first night there were fights in the audience. In Israel, art is not simply culture or entertainment – it's a matter of life and death."

Mehmet Ergen, the artistic director of the Arcola, laughed when Levin said he wanted to stage Peer Gynt there – the two-year-old theatre operates on a budget of half a shoestring, and had never tackled such a demanding project. But Levin felt that the classic has never been so relevant as now.

"OK, look, this is a stupid game, but if I had to choose one play to show the soul of the second half of the 20th century, it would be Peer Gynt. Only the 20th century allowed such people as he to come to prominence – someone who is a little nothing, and because he becomes a big nothing, he thinks he is a big something. It is the first time in history when the religion of most people is not Judaism or Islam or Christianity – it is the ego."

Although Ibsen's play derives from Scandinavian temperament and history, Levin feels it is not best served by a northern setting. "I want to detach it from all this cold, snowy, gloomy. He wrote it in Italy, so I want to take it and put some light and some warmth into it. It's an odyssey, so I want to set it where the original odyssey began."

The incidental music, accordingly, will not be Grieg but Balkan folk music, played on violin, concertina and washboard. Nor will the musicians remain on the side. "They will get up, sit down, interrupt the action." And, since it is a journey, the audience will sit on either side of the stage. "We will watch the actors, the dogs, the carts passing by." Another grand gesture. "We will watch life!"

'Peer Gynt' is at the Arcola Theatre, London E8, from 4 Feb (020-7503 1646)