Yehoshua Sobol Explained

Yehoshua Sobol
Birth Date:1939 8, df=yes
Birth Place:Tel Mond
Education:The Sorbonne
Occupation:Playwright, writer and director

Yehoshua Sobol, sometimes written Joshua Sobol (Hebrew: יהושע סובול; born 24 August 1939), is an Israeli playwright, writer, and theatre director.

Biography

Yehoshua Sobol was born in Tel Mond. His mother's family fled the pogroms in Europe in 1922 and his father's family immigrated from Poland in 1934 to escape the Nazis.[1] Sobol is married to Edna, set and costume designer. They have a daughter, Neta, and a son, Yahli Sobol, a singer and writer. Sobol studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, and graduated with a diploma in philosophy. Born to a secular Jewish family, he identifies as an atheist.[2]

Theatre career

Sobol's first play was performed in 1971 by the Municipal Theatre in Haifa, where Sobol worked from 1984 to 1988 as a playwright and later assistant artistic director. The performance of his play The Jerusalem Syndrome, in January 1988, led to widespread protests, whereupon Sobol resigned from his post as artistic director.

In 1983, after the Haifa production of his play Weininger's Night (The Soul of a Jew), he was invited to participate in the official part of the Edinburgh Festival. Between 1983 and 1989 Sobol wrote three related plays: Ghetto, Adam and Underground, which constitute together The Ghetto triptich.

Ghetto premiered in Haifa in May 1984. It won the David's Harp award for best play. That year, Peter Zadek's German version of the play was chosen by Theatre Heute as best production and best foreign play of the year. It has since been translated into more than 20 languages and performed in more than 25 countries. Following Nicholas Hytner's production of the English-language version by David Lan at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain in 1989, the play won the Evening Standard and the London Critics award for Best Play of the Year and was nominated for the Olivier Award in the same category. It was coldly received in New York, however. In his review of the play in the New York Times, Frank Rich described it as a "tedious stage treatment of the Holocaust."[3]

Since 1995, Sobol has collaborated with Viennese director Paulus Manker on a number of projects exploring new forms of the theatrical experience.

In 1995, Der Vater (The Father) a work by Niklas Frank and Joshua Sobol commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) opened at the Theatre an der Wien under the direction of Paulus Manker. The play is about Niklas Frank's father, Hans Frank, who was Hitler’s Governor general in Poland and was hanged in Nuremberg in 1946. In 1996, they created Alma for the Wiener Festwochen. Alma is a polydrama based on the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel. It played in Vienna for six successive seasons and toured to Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem and Prague. In the Vienna production, the scenes of Alma’s life were performed simultaneously on all floors and in all rooms of a former Jugendstil sanatorium near Vienna. The guests were invited to abandon the immobilised position of spectator in a conventional drama, replace it with the mobile activity of traveller, thus partaking in a "theatrical journey". By choosing the events, the path, and the person to follow after each event, each participant constructed her or his personal version of the "Polydrama". In 2000, Sobol and Manker created F@LCO – A CYBER SHOW, a multimedia musical about the Austrian pop singer Falco. Staged in the former Varieté theatre Ronacher in Vienna, F@LCO offered the audience a choice between a more expensive, passive ticket for the boxes or the balconies, from which spectators could only watch the show from distance, or a cheap, "active" ticket on the floor, close to the rostrum (in the shape of @, the Internet at symbol) on which the show was performed. This position allowed the active spectator to move around during the show, dance and buy drinks at the bars installed under the catwalks.

Plays

Directing

Teaching

Published works

(partial list)

Awards

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/joshua-sobol-on-the-suicidal-tendency-of-judaism.premium-1.490403 Joshua Sobol on the suicidal tendency of Judaism
  2. News: In God We Don't Trust: Five Israeli Atheists Bare Their Souls. Haaretz. Coby Ben-Simhon. 2012-07-26.
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/01/theater/review-theater-sobol-s-ghetto-a-holocaust-drama-with-music.html Sobol's Ghetto: A Holocaust Drama with Music

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