ONE OF THE KEY THEMES emerging from George Tabori's interviews and essays throughout the 1970s and early 1980s is the relationship between art and life. In these texts and conversations, Tabori expresses his preference for life over art, proclaims that he considers it imperative to turn actors into human beings (and not human beings into actors), and stresses the importance of developing a radical, theatrical “humanism,” a new aesthetic that puts the actor at the center of all theatrical endeavors.

Ideas about art and life, playing and being, figure prominently in Tabori's work. Anat Feinberg has outlined some of the key tenets of his thinking in her book Embodied Memories: The Theatre of George Tabori (1999). I build upon her explorations by probing more deeply into Tabori's “humanism,” his view of the human being and of the actor in particular, underscoring the extraordinary humanist message he conveys. I chart the formation of this view throughout his development from novelist to playwright and playmaker, and, in doing so, try to arrive at a critical assessment of Tabori's ethics of life and theater, which has resonance beyond his own particular life and work.

Tabori's first four novels, Beneath the Stone the Scorpion (1945), Companions of the Left Hand (1946), Original Sin (1947), and The Caravan Passes (1951), written during and in the direct aftermath of World War II, engage in one way or another with the process of aging, with disease, mortality, and death.