In his four last plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Dona Rosita the Spinster) Federico Garc ́ia Lorca offered his disturbed and disturbing personal vision to Spanish audiences of the 1930s---unready, as he thought them, for the sexual frankness and surreal expression of his more experimental work. The authentic sense of danger of Lorca's theatre is finely conveyed here in John Edmunds's fluent and rhythmic new translations that lend themselves admirably to performance.
Curt Columbus endows these timeless dramas Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard with dialogue that is faithful to the russian original but dazzlingly attuned to contemporary audiences.
Ivanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard Newly repackaged, here are the five masterpieces by one of the world's greatest playwrights, in translation by Ann Dunnigan. As Robert Brustein declares in the foreword to this edition: "in the modern theater...there are none who bring the drama to a higher realization of its human role."
Lope de Vega (1562-1635), widely regarded as the architect of the drama of the Spanish Golden Age, was known by his contemporaries as the `monster of Nature' on account of his creativity as a playwright. Claiming to have written more than a thousand plays, he created plots and characters notable for their energy, inventiveness and dramatic power, and which, in contrast to French classical drama, combine the serious and the comic in their desire to imitate life. Fuente Ovejuna, based on Spanish history, and revealing how tyranny leads to rebelliion, is perhaps his best-known play. The Knight from Olmedo is a moving dramatization of impetuous and youthful passion which ends in death. Punishment without Revenge, Lope's most powerful tragedy, centres on the illicit relationship of a young wife with her stepson and the revenge of a dishonoured husband. These three plays, grouped here in translations which are faithful to the original Spanish, vivid and intended for performance, embody the very best of Lope's dramatic art. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
First Published in 1996. The Russian Theatre Archive makes available in English the best avant-garde plays from the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. It features monographs on major playwrights and theatre directors, introductions to previously unknown works, and studies of the main artistic groups and periods. Plays are presented in performing edition translations, including (where appropriate) musical scores, and instructions for music and dance. Whenever possible the translated texts will be accompanied by videotapes of performances of plays in the original language.
Anton Chekhov The Major Plays Ivanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.” So it is that his plays express life through subtle construction, everyday dialogue, and an electrically charged atmosphere in which even the most casual words and actions assume great importance in his characters’ lives. This principle sets his plays apart from the rest, steering them clear of melodrama, and draws the audience into the lives of Chekhov’s colorful characters. Because of his adherence to realism, the playwright has been called an “incomparable artist of life.”* “What makes his work great is that it can be felt and understood not only by any Russian but by anybody in the world.”—*Leo Tolstoy With a Foreword by Robert Brustein and an Afterword by Rosamund Bartlett
