Arts in Brief: Sobol to get lifetime award

Playwright/director/educator will receive Life Achievement Prize at Israel Theater Prize awards ceremony.

By HELEN KAYE, JPOST STAFF
Playwright/director/educator Yehoshua Sobol, 71, will receive a Life Achievement Prize at the Israel Theater Prize awards ceremony on May 14 at the Gesher Theater in Jaffa.
The prize is awarded for the body of his work, plays “spanning subjects that are essential and central to the Israeli and Jewish experience.”
These include the famed Ghetto, The Night of the 20th, Soul of a Jew, Village, and, most notoriously, The Jerusalem Syndrome, which provoked riots on opening night.
Armed with a teacher’s certificate and a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, Sobol initially taught, worked as a journalist and wrote short stories. He began his play-writing career in 1970 with the well-received The Days to Come at the Haifa Theater. His corpus includes some 60 plays in all whose subject matter is Jews and society, whether current or historical, here, or in the Diaspora.
‘Endgame’ comes to the Khan
Nola Chilton is directing Samuel Beckett’s bleak Endgame, a four-character drama about the rundown to death in a dead world, at the Jerusalem Khan. There is wheelchair-bound Hamm, his servant Clov, and Hamm’s despised, legless parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in trash cans. By turns savage and funny, Endgame takes place in a cellar with only a tiny window to look out into the world. It premiered in London in 1957.
Endgame opens at the Khan on April 24.
Ushering in a new generation
From May 2 to 6 the Future Theater Festival 2010 takes place atTzavta, Tel Aviv. The fifth of its kind, the festival featuresproductions and performances by recent graduates of the country’sacting schools.
The events include video-art pieces, aphotography exhibition, and productions from 11 acting schoolscomprising the premieres of originals works by the students themselvesand plays by the likes of Hanoch Levin and Harold Pinter.
The festival is produced by Tzavta specifically to showcase up-and-coming talent, the theater’s new generation.