Daniel Gerould – författare

Two outstanding examples of socialist-themed plays are combined in this remarkable volume.The Conspiracy of Feelings by Yurii Olesha (1899-1960) is based on his highly respected short novel Envy about the struggle between the old and new in Soviet society. The play, called The Conspiracy of Feelings, is not a simple adaptation, but an original work that reconceived the novel. The play explores the precarious position of the intelligentsia in the new collective state.The Little Theatre of The Green Goose was written by Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski (1905-53) who was one of Poland's most beloved poets. After World War II, he began work as a playwright, inventing a colorful theatre troupe of performers (animal and human) and contributing a new instalment of The Little Theatre of the Green Goose each week to Przekroj, the Cracow literary magazine. Intended for reading only, The Green Goose went unperformed in Galczynski's life and was finally staged in 1955 and gained a permanent place in the theatre and became a force for the creation of the new Polish drama that flourished in the 1960s.

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas.Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism.Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.

Two outstanding examples of socialist-themed plays are combined in this remarkable volume.The Conspiracy of Feelings by Yurii Olesha (1899-1960) is based on his highly respected short novel Envy about the struggle between the old and new in Soviet society. The play, called The Conspiracy of Feelings, is not a simple adaptation, but an original work that reconceived the novel. The play explores the precarious position of the intelligentsia in the new collective state.The Little Theatre of The Green Goose was written by Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski (1905-53) who was one of Poland's most beloved poets. After World War II, he began work as a playwright, inventing a colorful theatre troupe of performers (animal and human) and contributing a new instalment of The Little Theatre of the Green Goose each week to Przekroj, the Cracow literary magazine. Intended for reading only, The Green Goose went unperformed in Galczynski's life and was finally staged in 1955 and gained a permanent place in the theatre and became a force for the creation of the new Polish drama that flourished in the 1960s.

The Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas.Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism.Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.

A Maeterlinck Reader is a compilation of plays, poems, essays, short stories and aphorisms by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Maurice Maeterlinck. The editors have included, in fresh translations that convey Maeterlinck’s revolutionary innovations in theatrical language, selections that show facets both exemplary and extraordinary of this Nobel Prize winning author, the «Missing Link of Modern Drama.»

The major critical texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Syinka and Havel. The best available collection of theoretical writing on the theatre from both the Eastern and Western traditions.

Available for the First Time in Paperback!From Aristotle's Poetics to Vaclav Havel, the debate about the nature and function of theatre has been marked by controversy. Daniel Gerould's landmark work, Theatre/Theory/Theatre, collects history's most influential Eastern and Western dramatic theorists – poets, playwrights, directors and philosophers – whose ideas about theatre continue to shape its future. In complete texts and choice excerpts spanning centuries, we see an ongoing dialogue and exchange of ideas between actors and directors like Craig and Meyerhold, and writers such as Nietzsche and Yeats. Each of Gerould's introductory essays shows fascinating insight into both the life and the theory of the author. From Horace to Soyinka, Corneille to Brecht, this is an indispensable compendium of the greatest dramatic theory ever written.