World Classics – serie
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98 produkter
98 produkter
Anouilh Plays: 1
Antigone; Leocadia; The Waltz of the Toreasors; The Lark; Poor Bitos
Häftad, Engelska, 1987
379 kr
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A selection of the most enduring work of one of this century's best-known French playwrights Jean Anouilh (1910-87) along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, was at the forefront of the post-war generation of playwrights in Paris. In England his plays were championed by Peter Brook. Antigone is a response to the German occupation of France and established his popularity in 1944 (the Germans ironically, thought that it was a pro-Nazi in its portrayal of King Creon and thus allowed its production); Poor Bitos, Anouilh's angriest play explores the act of judicial murder and The Lark is a version of the Joan of Arc story. All three plays show his fondness for reworking myth, history and legend. Meanwhile Leocadia, about an opera singer who dies after a three day love affair with a prince and The Waltz of the Toreadors, about a general whose mistress attempts to prove his wife's infidelity, represent another talent - for ironic, modern comedy."Anouilh is a poet but not a poet of words, he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing." (Peter Brook)
Buchner: Complete Plays
Danton's Death; Leonce and Lena; Woyzeck; The Hessian Courier; Lenz; On Cranial Nerves; Selected Letters
Häftad, Engelska, 1987
394 kr
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The complete collection of Buchner's plays in one volume Buchner was acknowledged by figures as divergent as Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht to be the forefather of modern theatre. On his death at the age of 23, he left behind some outstanding dramatic works: his historical drama, Danton's Death, 'the most remarkable first play in European culture' (Guardian), translated here by Howard Brenton and Jane Fry; the innovatory tragedy, Woyzeck, translated by John Mackendrick; and the absurdist comedy, Leonce and Lena, translated by Anthony Meech. He also left a powerful short story, Lenz, an important account of his research into cranial nerves, and his revolutionary pamphlet, The Hessian Courier. All these are collected in this one volume and supplemented with a selection of his remarkable letters.
271 kr
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"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) This volume contains Ibsen's famous early epic, Peer Gynt, and the historical tragedy The Pretenders, which together with Brand and Emperor and Galilean form a magisterial quartet at the fulcrum of Ibsen's career. George Bernard Shaw praised Peer Gynt (1867) for the power of Ibsen's 'grip on humanity ...The universality of Ibsen makes his plays come home to all nations'. The Pretenders (1863), described by Kenneth Tynan as Ibsen's 'first great play', was also his first real success in the theatre.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
410 kr
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These three tragedies were written at the height if Lorca's powers and display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramatic technique. Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Dona Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.
379 kr
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Aphra Behn was among the wittiest and most prolific playwrights of her day The Widow Ranter is a tragi-comedy, The False Count concerns the marriage of a young woman to a much older man whilst The Lucky Chance ran into instant criticism for immorality. The Rover is her most famous comedy and Abdelazar is her only tragedy."Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common...All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn." (Virginia Woolf on Aphra Behn)
379 kr
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Modern accurate and stageable translations of five of Gorky's plays This volume includes Gorky's major works for the theatre. The Lower Depths, first staged by the Moscow Art theatre in 1902, portrays a cast of down and outs living in the underbelly of Russian society; Summerfolk depicts a society after the disintegration of feudalism with a new class of businessmen, intellectuals and professionals. Children of the Sun was completed in prison in 1905 and premiered in St Petersburg in the same year, St Petersburg critic Alexander Kugel wrote: "If Summerfolk boxed the ears of the intelligentsia, the Children of the Sun spits in their face"; Barbarians looks at the tragedy of an individual caught between opposing forces in a society on the brink of revolution - Lenin's future Minister of Culture, Alexander Kugel wrote: "Gorky helps us to understand and assess the mighty phenomenon of this war between two forms of barbarism through the direct experience of real people"; Enemies looks at the struggle between workers and industrialists and has been described as "the missing link between Chekhov and the Russian revolution" (Observer)
286 kr
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This volume includes The Seagull, a about the battle for power between a mother and her son which ends in tragedy; Uncle Vanya tells of two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere, and a flirtation that brings disaster; Three Sisters in which three siblings wrestle with their futures and The Cherry Orchard where the old must inevitably give way to the new. Haunting and elusive, these four great late masterpieces have found in Michael Frayn a translator who perfectly captures their delicate balance of the tragic and the absurd. The volume also contains four of Chekhov's early short 'vaudevilles' as well as a substantial introduction by Michael Frayn."The critical clamour for a Complete Chekhov in Michael Frayn's translation has borne fruit" (Sunday Times)
Marivaux Plays
Double Inconstancy;False Servant;Game of Love & Chance;Careless Vows;Feigned Inconstancy;1-act plays
Häftad, Engelska, 1988
379 kr
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Marivaux's light-hearted comedies of love and intrigue are enjoying a vigorous revival One of the most original of French eighteenth century dramatists, Marivaux wrote over thirty comedies of love and intrigue. This, the only major single-volume selection of Marivaux's plays in English, brings together five full-length and five shorter pieces in lively translations by John Bowen, Michael Sadler, John Walters, Donald Watson and Nicholas Wright.
379 kr
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This volume contains everything Wilde wrote in dramatic form Wilde's masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest is printed here in its usual three-act form, but with an appendix containing the best material from the original four-act version. Also included are his three 'problem plays', Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, as well as his once-banned Salome and several other little-known but fascinating dramas. H. Montgomery Hyde, an acknowledged expert on Wilde and author of several books on him, provides an introduction to Wilde's life and work with special attention to the composition and performance of the plays."Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audiences, with the whole theatre" (George Bernard Shaw)
Orton Complete Plays
Entertaining Mr Sloane; Loot; What the Butler; Ruffian; Erpingham Camp; Funeral Games; Good & ...
Häftad, Engelska, 1976
410 kr
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I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny' Joe Orton. This volume contains everything that Orton wrote for the theatre, radio and television from his first play in 1964, The Ruffian on the Stair, up to his violent death in 1967 at the age of 34. It includes his major successes: Entertaining Mr Sloane, which 'made more blood boil that any other British play in the last ten years' (The Times); Loot, 'a Freudian nightmare', which sports with superstitions about death - as well as life; his farce masterpiece, What the Butler Saw; The Erpingham Camp, his version of The Bacchae, set in a Butlin's holiday resort; together with his television plays, Funeral Games and The Good and Faithful Servant. The volume includes a revealing introduction by John Lahr, Orton's official biographer."He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Observer)
379 kr
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This volume contains everything Brendan Behan wrote in dramatic form in English Contains the three famous full-length plays: The Quare Fellow, set in an Irish prison ("In Brendan Behan's tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight ...with superb dramatic tact, the tragedy is concealed beneath layer after layer of rough comedy" Observer); The Hostage, set in a Dublin lodging-house of doubtful repute where a young English soldier is being kept prisoner, "shouts, sings, thunders and stamps with life...a masterpiece" (The Times); and Richard's Cork Leg, set in a graveyard, "a joyous celebration of life" (Guardian). The volume also contains three one-act plays, originally written for radio and all intensely autobiographical, Moving Out, A Garden Party and The Big House.
410 kr
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This first volume in the Coward Collection contains four plays written within a two year period when Coward and the century were still in their 20s. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer. Hay Fever, a comedy of bad manners, concerns a weekend with friends of the Bliss family, who have all been invited independently for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. The Vortex was a controversial drama in its time, introducing drug-addiction onto the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned. Fallen Angels, which is written for two star actresses was described as 'degenerate', 'vile', 'obscene', 'shocking' - the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women. Easy Virtue is an elegant, laconic tribute to a lost world of drawing-room dramas, no other writer went more directly to the jugular of that moralistic, tight-lipped but fundamentally hypocritical 20s society. "He is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history" Terence Rattigan
394 kr
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The plays in this volume demonstrate the extraordinary skill and versatility Coward's writing achieved in the late 1920s. The volume contains his best-loved classic, Private Lives, which was an immeditate hit when it was first staged in 1930. Coward's sparkling dialogue and repartee have ensured the play's popularity ever since. Of Bitter-Sweet in 1929 Noel Coward wrote that it was "a musical that gave me more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Not especially on acount of its dialogue or its lyrics or its music or its production but as a whole." The Marquise is an "eighteenth century comedy" filled with maids and duels, whilst Post-Mortem is a vilification of war that contains some of Coward's most powerful writing.
Coward Plays: 3
Design for Living; Cavalcade; Conversation Piece; Tonight at 8.30 (i); Still Life
Häftad, Engelska, 1979
379 kr
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The third volume of Coward's plays contains some of his best work from the thirties. Design for Living - is about a triangular alliance between two men and a woman, based on friends of Coward's, which he waited to write "until she and he and I had arrived by different roads in our careers at a time and a place when we felt we could all three play together with a more or less equal degree of success." Cavalcade was Coward's most ambitious stage project, set during the Boer War, which cost GBP30,000 in its day and which includes scenes of the relief of the sinking of the Titanic and the coming of the Jazz Age. Conversation Piece is a musical comedy that Noel wrote for the Parisian star Yvonne Printemps and includes the song "I'll Follow My Secret Heart". Also in the volume are three short plays including Tonight at 8.30 - Hands Across the Sea, a gentle satire of colonials and London Society; Still Life which became the film Brief Encounter and Fumed Oak a suburban comedy about a 'worm who turns'. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley.
Coward Plays: 4
Blithe Spirit; Present Laughter; This Happy Breed; Tonight at 8.30 (ii)
Häftad, Engelska, 1979
379 kr
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Volume Four of Noel Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward's plays from the thirties and forties which includes Blithe Spirit, a comedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The play that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs were bringing it to Britain "I shall ever be grateful, for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war." The play was for years the longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona - self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that Noel best knew and loved, and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote.This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter pieces fromTonight at 8.30 - is a farce set in the South of France, and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; The Astonished Heart is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal sexual obsession. Red Peppers, which closes the volume, was a cynical tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War.
271 kr
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The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where,' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman. Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
286 kr
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This volume contains Ibsen's two most famous and frequently read, studied and performed plays about women: A Doll's House (1879), his first international success, which 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life', and Hedda Gabler (1890), now one of his most popular plays, but greeted at first with bewilderment and outrage ('The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas' Pictorial World). Also included is An Enemy of the People (1883), whose central character was the actor Konstantin Stanislavski's favourite role.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
271 kr
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"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) Includes three of Henrik Ibsen's most important works from his middle period. Generally regarded as the father of modern theatre, Ibsen's 'influence on contemporaries and following generations, whether directly or indirectly...can hardly be overestimated' (John Russell Taylor). The three plays in this volume show how Ibsen gradually turned from the study of social problems to a closer concern with the sickness of individuals. In Rosmersholm (1886), 'this most enthralling of Ibsen's works' (George Bernard Shaw), he explores the hypnotic hold one person may gain over another, a theme he took up in his next play, The Lady from the Sea (1888), and which reappears in Little Eyolf (1894), which William Archer ranked 'beside, if not above, the very greatest of Ibsen's works'.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
271 kr
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"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) The plays shine freshly from the pages ...This will be our definitive Ibsen." (JC Trewin) This volume contains Ibsen's first great modern prose play and his two last symbolic dramas. The Pillars of Society, written between 1875 and 1877, exhibits many of the classic elements which recur in the subsequent plays - a marriage founded on a lie, women stunted by social conventions, an arrogant man destroying the happiness of those around him. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), according to Edvard Munch, is "the most powerful winter landscape in Scandinavian art"; and Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), also dealing with "the coldness of heart", showed, said Bernard Shaw, "no decay of Ibsen's highest qualities. His magic is nowhere more potent.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)
Synge: Complete Plays
In the Shadow of the Glen; Riders to the Sea; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy of the Western World; Deirdre of the Sorrows
Häftad, Engelska, 1981
394 kr
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A re-issue of the collected plays by one of Ireland's most celebrated writers In The Shadow of the Glen an old man tests his wife's commitment by feigning death; Riders to the Sea is inspired by Synge's stay on the Aran Islands and shadows the death of a way of life as a mother sees her sons die before her eyes; The Tinker's Wedding is about a woman's desire for marriage to her tinker husband and is full of Synge's fascination for the tinker breed who had freed themselves from govenment and conventions while giving way to instincts of sexual promsicuity, fighting and drinking; The Well of Saints is set near a holy well known for its cures of blindness and epilepsy and centres on the figure of Martin Doul, who is blind and has two illusions - the first, that he and his wife Mary are a handsome couple and the second, that the visible world is full of wonder and delight; The Playboy of the Western World, in which a young man lies about the death of his father offended audiences when first produced in 1907 on account of its 'immodest' references to Irish womanhood and aroused a prolonged and bitter controversy, which lasted until the author's death in 1909; Deirdre of the Sorrows is Synge's last play, published posthumously and tells the story of a young and beautiful girl, destined to be the bride of an ageing king who elopes with a younger man and after the magical seven years returns only to bring with her the destruction of a city.
Rattigan Plays: 1
French Without Tears; The Winslow Boy; The Browning Version; Harlequinade
Häftad, Engelska, 1982
394 kr
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"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan" (Guardian) Constantly revived on stage, radio and television, Rattigan's plays demonstrate their continuing power to hold and move audiences. This volume contains his best work from the thirties and forties, including his first play French Without Tears, about a group of "bright young things" attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid numerous distractions. The second play The Winslow Boy, based on an actual case, is the powerful, deliberately well-made drama of a father's attempts to clear his cadet son's name against the assembled might of Britain's naval establishment - the Admiralty. Completing the volume are two one-act plays Harlequinade, a sustained joke against some well-worn theatrical conventions and The Browning Version which portrays a disliked classics master, Crocker-Harris on the point of retiring after eighteen years of unsuccessful teaching "well up there among the dozen greatest plays written in this country this century." (The Spectator) "Terence Rattigan is the English Tennessee Williams.He maps out the same fatal divorce between the spiritual and the physical, the same drama of lost souls and misdirected lusts, of people stranded with their frustrations, blasted by guilt and reaching out for rescue that they know full well will fail" (Sunday Times)
286 kr
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The second volume in the series of authoritative Methuen editions of Strindberg's Collected Plays This volume contains two of Strindberg's best-known plays from the years following his mental breakdown: the expressionist masterpiece A Dream Play (1901), which he described as 'my most beloved play, child of my greatest pain'; and both parts of The Dance of Death (1900), a terrifying analysis of a tormented marriage: 'it leaves an astonishing, an almost unaccountable, impression of genius ...as a beggar's cloak full of holes may have a kind of majestic beauty when the wind fills it, so this broken drama, having unmistakably the winds of vision in it, has beauty and dignity and power' (The Times, 1928). Also included is his earlier short play The Stronger (1889), a fascinating study of the power of personality."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)
Moliere Five Plays
The School for Wives; Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; The Miser; The Hypochondriac
Häftad, Engelska, 1982
394 kr
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This volume brings together five of Moliere's finest and best-known plays. The three verse plays, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and The School for Wives, have been skilfully turned into sparkling English couplets by Richard Wilbur's 'brilliant rhymed translation' Sunday Telegraph; while the playwright Alan Drury has translated the two prose comedies, The Miser and The Hypochondriac ('a cherubically funny translation' Independent).
Coward Plays: 5
Relative Values; Look After Lulu; Waiting in the Wings; Suite in Three Keys
Häftad, Engelska, 1983
394 kr
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Containing Coward's best work from the last two decades of his life, this volume includes Relative Values, which ran for over a year in 1951-2, Look After Lulu (1959), his perennially popular Feydeau adaptation, Waiting in the Wings (1960), a bravura piece set in a home for retired actresses, and Suite in Three Keys (1965), a trilogy of plays which gave Coward his last roles on stage. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer, and includes an extensive chronology of Coward's work.
332 kr
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This volume contains three of Strindberg's most famous plays, spanning twenty years of prodigious creativity and recurrent personal crises: The Father, which displays Strindberg's suspicion of women at its most implacable, 'powerful and profound' (Guy de Maupassant); Miss Julie (1888), which he called his masterpiece, and in which he presents with startling modernity the conflict between sexual passion and social position; and The Ghost Sonata (1907), written in physical pain and spiritual torment, which is a phantasmagoric dream play, 'a direct source for the Theatre of the Absurd' (Martin Esslin)."Michael Meyer is the translator most actors turn to when seeking a definitive text" (Sunday Times)
Galsworthy Five Plays
Strife; Justice; The Eldest Son; The Skin Game; Loyalties
Häftad, Engelska, 1999
394 kr
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John Galsworthy (1867-1933), novelist and dramatist, is most widely known as the author of The Forsyte Saga, but recent productions testify to the power that his plays still exert over modern audiences and the strength and relevance of the issues he raise In Strife, Galsworthy deals with industrial relations; in Justice, with prison life - it was one of the few plays to effect real reforms. The Eldest Son is also about injustice - one law for the rich, another for the poor; The Skin Game, Galsworthy's first commercial success, presents class conflict; while Loyalties, 'a crime drama', is about division and prejudice.John Galsworthy is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Rattigan Plays: 2
The Deep Blue Sea; Separate Tables; In Praise of Love; Before Dawn
Häftad, Engelska, 1985
394 kr
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"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan" (Guardian) This selection from the best of Rattigan's work from the '50s onwards includes two of his most popular plays, The Deep Blue Sea which movingly depicts the closing stages of a hopeless, adulterous, socially inequitable love affair between an RAF war hero and a judge's wife; Separate Tables, printed in its original version for the first time, comprises two one-act plays both set in a private hotel in Bournemouth but with a different pair of principal characters - in one a disgraced politician and his estranged wife, in the other, a bogus major and young woman dominated by her mother "This gay version hardly departs from the original, yet converts a conventional West End drama into a forceful attack upon 1950s witch-hunts and stigmatising of homosexuals...how luminously Rattigan evokes the sexually intolerant and phobic attitudes of fifties middle England" (Evening Standard); the volume closes with In Praise of Love, in which a woman and her husband persist in gallantly deceiving one another each pretending to be unaware that she is fatally ill.
Pinero: Three Plays
The Magistrate; The Second Mrs Tanqueray; Trelawny of the 'Wells'
Häftad, Engelska, 1985
394 kr
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Born within a year of both Shaw and Wilde, Pinero was one of the most popular - and prolific - playwrights of his age. This volume contains his three best - and still most often performed - plays, each written in a different mode: The Magistrate (1885), a splendid farce; The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), a social problem play; and Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), an affectionate comedy on the inevitability of change.
Pirandello Three Plays
The Rules of the Game; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Henry IV
Häftad, Engelska, 1985
332 kr
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Three essential plays by one of Europe's foremost 20th century dramatists The Rules of the Game (1918) is based closely on the author's own unhappy marriage centred around Leone Gala and his wife who are separated, their only contract, a formal visiting procedure; Henry 1V, shows the effect of madness and delusion on the figure of a king (1922); and in Six Characters in Search of an Author six actors are trapped inside a rehearsal for an unwritten play desperately needing a writer to complete their story and release them. Intrigued by their situation, the director and his company of actors listen as the characters begin to describe and argue over the key events of their lives. This, his best known play, caused riots when it was first produced at the Teatro Valle in Rome in 1921.
332 kr
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"Meyer's translations of Ibsen are a major fact in one's general sense of post-war drama. Their vital pace, their unforced insistence on the poetic centre of Ibsen's genius, have beaten academic versions from the field" (George Steiner) The two epic plays in this volume stand, together with Peer Gynt and The Pretenders, at the fulcrum of Ibsen's career. Brand (1865) stated sharply and vividly the necessity of following one's private conscience and 'being oneself'. It created an immediate sensation and was hailed by Strindberg as 'the voice of a Savonarola'. Emperor and Galilean (1873), which Ibsen referred to as his masterpiece, is both his farewell to the epic drama and the forerunner of his great naturalistic prose plays that were to burst on the nineteenth century.Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)