Playwright Ronald Harwood to lecture in Tel Aviv University

Tony nominated and Academy Award-winning playwright, Sir Ronald Harwood, is the 2011 Yael Levin Writer-in-residence lecturer, and will be a guest of Tel Aviv University's Department of English and American Studies from 20-24 March. Harwood will be holding a large public lecture in Tel Aviv University, on the 24th of March, 5 PM. The lecture will center on his latest play "Collaboration" which is a powerful dramatization of the artistic and political "collaboration" between author Stephan Zweig and musician Richard Strauss during the time of the Third Reich.

A prolific playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and theatre historian, Harwood was originally trained as an actor, and from 1953 to 1958, was Sir Donald Wolfit's personal dresser, an experience he would later draw on when he wrote the stage play, THE DRESSER, for which he was nominated for a Broadway Tony Award. In 1960, he started a new career as a writer and would prove to be quite prolific, penning plays, novels and non-fiction books.

A recurring theme in Harwood's work is his fascination with the stage, its artists and artisans as displayed in the aforementioned THE DRESSER, AFTER THE LIONS (about Sarah Bernhardt) ,ANOTHER TIME (about a gifted piano player) and QUARTET (about aging opera singers). Harwood also presented a BBC series based on his theatre history book, ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, and also has a strong interest in the WWII period, as highlighted by the films OPERATION DAYBREAK, THE STATEMENT, THE PIANIST and his screen-adapted play, TAKING SIDES. Based on true stories, the two last films feature once more musicians as their main characters.

His plays TAKING SIDED and COLLABORATION were performed simultaneously on the London stage in 2009, at the Duchess theatre, which Harwood says "is one of the very few theatres able to hold audience and actors in an intimate embrace. It is, I believe, the ideal home for these plays which deal with the conflict between art and politics and the agonising personal and moral choices that had to be faced by the protagonists. But those choices have still to be made by us, now, and the question how would we have behaved lies at the heart of both plays".
Harwood has written numerous screenplays, including THE PIANIST (for which he won an Oscar for best screenplay in 2002), LOVE IN THE TIMES OF CHOLERA and THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)
Harwood was awarded the Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire, in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to drama.

 

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