Chichester Season Will Feature Two Plays By Oscar Winner Harwood | Playbill

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News Chichester Season Will Feature Two Plays By Oscar Winner Harwood Playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood told Playbill.com that the Chichester Festival will present two of his plays this summer.

Harwood's 1995 drama Taking Sides — about the conductor Kurt Furtwangler, who chose to stay in Germany after the Nazis came to power — will be revived.

In the same season The Collaboration — about the pre-war writing partnership between Richard Strauss and the Jewish writer Stephan Zweig — will receive its world premiere.

Both plays are concerned with what Harwood calls the "moral choices we have to make."

"We have to make them everyday in our lives," said the writer, who just won a BAFTA for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for the film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." "But they are very dramatic in times of stress, especially in totalitarian times."

Another Harwood play will receive its world premiere when An English Tragedy opens at the Watford Palace Theatre on Feb. 18 following previews that began Feb. 14. That play, which is also concerned with moral choices, focuses on John Amery, the anti-Semitic fascist hanged by the British for making propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis. Amery's father Leo was a member of Churchill's cabinet and secretly half-Jewish. Harwood is best known for his play The Dresser. It was his screenplay for the movie version, starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney, that earned the South Africa-born writer his first Oscar nomination. Harwood finally won his Academy Award in 2002 with his screenplay for Polanski's film "The Pianist."

 
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