Eli Sinai was born in Europe, and his professional theatrical training involved a deep attachment to the achievements of European culture. His behavior, his thinking processes, and even his pronunciation, always bore a clear European imprint. 

And yet,  throughout his seventy years of life in Israel he was attracted to the local landscapes and light and to Israeli materials, which he painted and photographed in abundance, and knew how to use them in the design of many original Israeli plays, many of them produced for the first time. These included: Wedding Night and Homeward Angel  by Yehoshua Sobol; The Orchard by Yosef Bar Yosef, Abandoned  Property by Shulamit Lapid, Pangsof the Messiah and Exile in Jerusalem (Elsa)  by Motti Lerner, and many others. 

The singularity of his stage work in the design of the Israeli plays was part of his ability to integrate familiar, sharp and precise detailed realism, with no attempt to decorate or adorn. Eli Sinai limited himself to the use of simple materials, (cloth, tin, or wood), and to lyrical poetry, which often bordered on the surreal. 

Objects of Israeli reality, not often portrayed on stage, such as notice boards,  garden taps, metal screens, a crumbling brick wall, a branch of a tree, a twisted tin plate, have found their way to Eli Sinai’s stage designs. The way these objects were positioned on the stage, often isolated from everyday routine, as part of a new composition, and became a component of the dramatic activity all of these endowed these objects with a new life.