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Joshua Sobol- Playwright, author and director. Wrote more than forty plays. Some of his plays have been translated into many languages, and performed worldwide. His play GHETTO has been performed in leading theatres throughout the world and won many awards, including The Evening Standard and The London Critics Theatre Award for Best Play of the Year. It also won three Best Play Awards in Japan. In Israel Sobol received five times the David's Harp Award for "Playwright of the Year". Sobol directed productions in Israel, Germany, Switzerland and the USA. He has been teaching and conducting Drama Workshops at the universities of Tel Aviv and Beer Shiva in Israel, and at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. His first novel "SILENCE" appeared in Israel in 2000, in Germany in 2001 and in Holland in 2002. Sobol is a Member of All About Jewish Theatre Editorial Board Email Address: josobol@netvision.net.il  

I wrote Shneider and Shuster in the beginning of the nineties. It is a play for two comedians, and it tells the story of two Jewish actors who start their own satirical theatre in Lodz in 1928. They want their theatre to comment on the "sickness of the times", but the times are so sick, that they get swept away by the whirlwinds of history. Running
away from Hitler, they fall into Stalin's trap, and after having spent a lifetime in a Siberian gulag they finally land in the post communist wild capitalist world of today, where Shuster opens a luxury restaurant where he feeds to death his old friend Shneider who cannot stop eating, and who wants to swallow the entire world, only his stomach is too small
for his big eyes, and he ends up as a modern version of Garagantua. This original version of the play was directed by me in Basel in 1993, and it was also produced in Dresden and at the Gorki Theater in Berlin. There has been also a much appraised production of the play at the Pistolen Teatret in Stockholm some six years ago.

The Version performed at the Cylinder Theatre is a kind of a variation on the play. I developed this version following a creative dialogue with the director Michael Polyakoff. In this version my two comedians start with a satirical parody on the trend of the Genitalia Pornologues, and then they go back to their early beginnings in a kind of a flashback.
The stage version is a reduced and somewhat expurgated version in comparison with the full text that I offered the director.

Originally the play was remotely inspired by the characters of Djigan and Shumacher, but very very remotely indeed.

My dream is to mount a production of the original version of the play in Yiddish and also in Hebrew. Maybe I'll do it one day. ...

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1.Play sounds interesting -- article useless   Judy Rapoport, Tel Aviv    (10/31/2009)