Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> European - General

Expectation is an integral part of the reading experience. As we read a text, we begin to classify it and compare it to others with which it seems to share a family resemblance. Drama is a particularly rich and rewarding field for studying the complex ways in which such expectations are created. Theatre audiences and readers of plays are encouraged in a variety of ways to guess at what might unfold on the stage and on the page, and much of the pleasure of the theatrical experience revolves around this guessing game. Plays of Expectations explores these expectations through the lens...

Magruder's enlightening introduction sets each play within the context of its author's oeuvre and the theatrical culture of its time....

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This book focuses on the relationship of Bertolt Brecht to the theater of Russian director Vsevold E. Meyerhold. Eaton's analysis places Brecht's dramatic theory and practice in proper historical perspective, thereby increasing our understanding of the role of the Russian avant-garde in shaping modern theater. She clearly demonstrates the extent to which Meyerhold's influence on Brecht has been underestimated and she argues that the preservation of Meyerholdian theater should be numbered among Brecht's significant contributions to modern drama.""

In a series of essays on representative dramatists, Ronald Peacock follows the fortunes of poetic drama in Europe from the decline of romanticism, through the age of realism, to the renewal of poetic forms in the 1930s.

This essay collection grew out of a Hofstra University conference on the life, works, and influence of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the eighteenth-century German playwright, critic, and philosopher who essentially established a new national literature in Germany during the Enlightenment. The volume is divided into two main sections, in which various scholars confront and reevaluate two contrasting aspects of Lessing's character; the irrational poet and the rational thinker. In the first section, Lessing's aesthetics are discussed. His link to English literature, as well as his influence upon...

No modern play in the western dramatic tradition has provoked as much controversy or generated as much diversity of opinion as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Since its initial production in 1953, it has revolutionized the stage through its existentialism and apparent rejection of plot. This book is a valuable introduction to the play. It begins with a summary of the play and its origins and editions. It then explores the play's meaning and the historical and intellectual contexts informing Beckett's work. The book then examines Beckett's dramatic art and gives full coverage of...

A Platonic dialogue in the form of a double anachronism--the action takes place two centuries after our era--Joseph Brodsky's only play, Marbles, is set in a prison cell that alone provides for the three unities of classic drama: those of time, place, and action. A nightmare rather than a utopia, this play proceeds according to the immanent logic of mental aggravation as its two characters, the inmates Publius and Tullius, examine the tautology of their psychological, historical, and purely physical confines. The fusion of its dour, somewhat terrifying vision with the macabre...

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,...

"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...

Reissue of this Methuen classic to tie in with a major new production

The republic of Andorra is invaded by totalitarian forces. The populace capitulates to the anti-Semitism of the aggressor and betrays Andri, the foundling son of the local schoolmaster. But Andri it seems, is not a Jew at all.
Andorra explores the mechanism of racism with the story of a non-Jew brought up as a Jew, who falls victim to anti-Semitic hostility.

"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...