Sixteen Famous European Plays (Vintage 1943 Edition)

Description

These sixteen plays are part of a European testament, already inherited and richly enjoyed, as proven by the enormous popularity they attained not only in the countries of origin, but, in the benediction of handclaps across the sea, in our own theatre and in spite of the fact that they have often suffered sadly in translation. Quite by accident in selection they fall into two nearly equal groups: nine of them belong to the pre-World War I, Cherry-Orchard-Heartbreak-House Europe, and seven belong to that ominously quiet but superficially frantic period between 1918 and 1937, the intermezzo of our false security. By a tragic irony, undetected at the time, the last of them carried a French-comedy salute to classical Greek legend at the moment Austria found itself Anschlussed out of existence. In viewpoint and technique they range from the realistic social theme of The Wild Duck to the subjective discussion of illusion and reality in Six Characters in Search of an Author; from the bitter comedy of The Playboy to the lyric, but static, beauty of The Cradle Song, from the cynical sex pattern of Anatol to the ecstatic love song of The Dybbuk. To suggest that there is a close and detailed relationship among all these plays, out of such diverse countries and of such widely different treatment, is to embark upon a critical trapeze act which would make the Flying Codonas seem mere ground moles. Yet most of them are linked in one way or another to the mainsprings of European thought, to the mid-nineteenth-century revolution of ideas, and finally to the free theatre movement which carried the ideas into the playhouses. The theatre responded not only with new drama, but with a new stagecraft, wrought in its image and designed to emphasize the change.