And, after all, Nitzan notes, "The main plot of Hamlet is known to any cultured person."

Itai Tiran, a 26-year-old Israeli actor, plays Hamlet and his performance has been praised by critics around the world as "one of those actors that emerge once in a generation" (Ha'aretz, January 2005), and "one of the greatest Hamlets I have ever seen on stage and I have seen quite a few in my time." (Rivka Jacobson, The British Theater Guide).

In modern dress, the charismatic actor also displayed his musical talents by playing pieces from "Carmen" and "The Magic Flute" on a grand piano as part of the play.

A Brief Introduction to Cameri Theater

The Cameri Theater is one of the most important theaters in Israel. It has won the Israel Prize for its contribution to Israeli culture. Cameri Theatre (Chamber Theatre), company founded in Palestine in 1944 by a group of young actors who were in revolt against the conservatism of the two existing theatre groups, Habimah and Ohel, which still adhered to the earlier larger-than-life Russian style of acting, with exclusively realistic settings. The new company's first production was Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters (1945).

Audiences were delighted by the light colorful style of acting and the impressionistic settings, and in 1948 the Cameri, which had done good work in presenting a number of contemporary European plays in Hebrew translations, presented Moshe Shamir's He Walked through the Fields, the first play to be produced in the independent state of Israel and the first in Hebrew to present native-born Israelis in a realistic manner. Cameri continued to present new Jewish plays and good plays from outside Israel. Two of its greatest successes were Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, presented at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1956, and Nathan Alterman's dramatization of Sammy Gronemann's The King and the Cobbler, seen in London during the World Theatre Season of 1967. In 1961 the company moved into its own premises in the commercial and entertainment centre of Tel Aviv, and in 1970 it became the city's official municipal theatre.

Every year, it plays to more than 900,000 spectators in Tel Aviv, throughout Israel and all over the world.

In 2006, the Cameri Theater staged another of its productions, "Requiem," in Beijing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Capital Theater in the capital city.

Editor: Feng Hui