Yehoshua Sobol was born inTel Mond. His mother's family fled the pogroms in Europe in 1922 and his father's familyimmigrated 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 theSorbonne, Paris, and graduated with a diploma inphilosophy. Born to asecular Jewish family, he identifies as anatheist.[2]
Sobol's first play was performed in 1971 by the Municipal Theatre inHaifa, where Sobol worked from 1984 to 1988 as a playwright and later assistant artistic director. The performance of his playTheJerusalem 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 playWeininger's Night (The Soul of a Jew), he was invited to participate in the official part of theEdinburgh Festival. Between 1983 and 1989 Sobol wrote three related plays:Ghetto,Adam andUnderground, 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 byTheatre 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. FollowingNicholas Hytner's production of the English-language version byDavid Lan at theRoyal National Theatre of Great Britain in 1989, the play won theEvening Standard and the London Critics award for Best Play of the Year and was nominated for theOlivier 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 directorPaulus Manker on a number of projects exploring new forms of the theatrical experience.
In 1995,Der Vater (The Father) a work byNiklas Frank and Joshua Sobol commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) opened at the Theatre an der Wien under the direction ofPaulus Manker. The play is about Niklas Frank's father,Hans Frank, who wasHitler’s Governor general in Poland and was hanged inNuremberg in 1946. In 1996, they createdAlma for the Wiener Festwochen.Alma is a polydrama based on the life ofAlma Mahler-Werfel. It played inVienna for six successive seasons and toured toVenice,Lisbon, Los Angeles, Berlin,Jerusalem andPrague. 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 ofspectator in a conventional drama, replace it with the mobile activity oftraveller, 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 createdF@LCO – A CYBER SHOW, a multimedia musical about the Austrian pop singerFalco. Staged in the former Varieté theatreRonacher 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 Internetat 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.
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