Joshua Sobol - International Career

International Career

Sobol's international career started in 1983 with the Haifa production of his play Weininger's Night (The Soul of a Jew), which 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 became world famous shortly after its premiere in Haifa in May 1984. The play won the Israeli David's Harp award for best play. The Israeli opening was followed by Peter Zadek's much acclaimed German premiere of the play in July of the same year. The play and the production were chosen by Theater Heute as best production and best foreign play of the year. The play has been translated into more than 20 languages and performed by leading theatres in more than 25 countries throughout the world.

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.

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

In 1995 came the first performance of a work commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), Der Vater (The Father), by Niklas Frank and Joshua Sobol, directed by Paulus Manker at the Theater an der Wien. 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 immobilized 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.

In 2005, he was voted the 185th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.