Joshua Sobol

Joshua Sobol
Born	1939 (1939) Tel Mond
Education	The Sorbonne
Occupation	Playwright, writer and director

Yoshua (Yehoshua) Sobol (Hebrew: יהושע סובול‎‎) (born August 24, 1939), is an Israeli playwright, writer, and director.

Joshua 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. 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.

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 Theater 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."

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