The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) wrote both "pink" bittersweet comedies and "black" tragic dramas. Jean Anouilh Five Plays--the finest English-language anthology of his works--crackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. In Antigone, his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing. Eurydice, The Ermine, The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette are the other plays included in this edition.

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...

To the great lords of her time as well as the politicians of the Church expediency was God. So the Maid had to die. So to Warwick and Cauchon, her life has the'somewhat artificial, and certainly impersonal, quality of a play. Short scenes from it are played out during the trial as they struggle to turn her simplicity into heresy. But it is the glory of her life rather than the tragedy that is the triumphant climax of the play.