DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR (DON JUAN KOMMT AUS DEM KRIEG): The anti-hero of the title returns from the front in a fervour of despair. The girl he is searching for has died and the romantic ideal he is trying to construct is opposed by endless recriminations from the succession of women he encounters. Don Juan Comes Back from the War was first performed in this translation at the National Theatre in 1978. FIGARO GETS DIVORCED (FIGARO LÄSST SICH SCHEIGEN): An aristocratic couple and their two servants are on the run from a revolution. Their fortunes rise and fall against a background of social and political upheaval. Figaro Gets Divorced was premiered in this translation at the Gate Theatre in 1990.
Written in exile while in flight from the Nazis, this dark, bizarre evocation of everyday life under fascism is available for the first time in thirty years. This last book by Ödön von Horváth, one of the 20th-century’s great but forgotten writers, is a dark fable about guilt, fate, and the individual conscience. An unnamed narrator in an unnamed country is a schoolteacher with “a safe job with a pension at the end of it.” But, when he reprimands a student for a racist comment, he is accused of “sabotage of the Fatherland,” and his students revolt. A murder follows, and the teacher must face his role in it, even if it costs him everything. Horváth’s book both points to its immediate context—the brutalizing conformity of a totalitarian state, the emptiness of faith in the time of the National Socialists—and beyond, to the struggles of individuals everywhere against societies that offer material security in exchange for the abandonment of one’s convictions. Reminiscent of Camus’ The Stranger in its themes and its style, Youth Without God portrays a world of individual ruthlessness and collective numbness to the appeals of faith or morality. And yet, a commitment to the truth lifts the teacher and a small band of like-minded students out of this deepening abyss. It’s a reminder that such commitment did exist in those troubled times—indeed, they’re what led the author to flee Germany, first for Austria, and then France, where he met his death in a tragic accident, just two years after the publication of Youth Without God. Long out of print, this new edition resurrects a bracing and still-disturbing vision. “Horváth was telling the truth. Furiously.” —Shalom Auslander
Includes the plays Sladek and A Sexual Congress plus an introduction by Penny Black Set in the inter-war period of raging inflation in Germany, these two plays portray the losers in what von Horváth called ‘the gigantic battle between the individual and society’. In Sladek, Black’s version being the first to be published in English, we see how social conditions lead people to desperate action and violence, opening the road for dictators and fascists. Writtenjust as the Nazis came to power, A Sexual Congress predicts with frightening accuracy the cycle of violence that was to spread throughout Europe.
This never-before translated work by a major yet overlooked mid-20th century writer is a brutally funny look at the human comedy on the eve of Europe's decent into Fascism. It tells the tale of a failed used car salesman who wants to live the high life, and so decides to travel by train from Munich to Barecelona to attend the World's Fair — in hopes of meeting a beautiful, rich woman who will provide for his every whim. It's a highly-stylized and, at times, raucously funny tale of the almost-absurd: a dark and satiric look at Europeans, and especially Germans, on the brink of cataclysm. Adrift in their acquisitive desires, they are vulnerable to the propaganda of the State — making this novel brilliantly foresightful in its understanding of politics and human nature at a crucial point in modern history. Ödön von Horváth’s scathing insight, in fact, led to his having to flee the very society he depicted when, living in Berlin, he drew the wrath of the Nazis. And yet this hilarious tour-de-force — written just after his escape, and just before his death in a tragic accident — eschews bitterness for rambunctious perseverance and compassion, and provides ample evidence of why von Horváth deserves renewed appreciation.
With the Austro-Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth as our guide, Christopher Hampton's witty and erudite play takes us on a tour of the sun-soaked boulevards of 1940s Los Angeles. Taking in such improbable residents as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and the Marx Brothers amongst others, it brilliantly serves to open up a neglected chapter of American cultural history, as the wry and embittered European émigrés find themselves amidst the materialistic razzle-dazzle of Hollywood. Tales from Hollywood premiered at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre, Los Angeles, 1982 and at the National Theatre, London, in 1983.
Set in the socially and economically oppressed Vienna of the early thirties, this play is the story of a young girl's struggle to survive in the city, a victim of forces she does not comprehend. As the play opens, she is trying to sell her body to an anatomical institute.
Wedekind's expressionist plays influenced the whole course of modern drama A moralist who wore the mask of an immoralist, Wedekind was the terror of the German bourgeoisie. His work was censored and the original Lulu play was not even published during his lifetime; Wedekind toned it down and adapted it to make two plays: Pandora's Box and Earth-Spirit. The version in this volume, Lulu: A Monster Tragedy, is based on the first manuscript, presenting the original sexually voracious heroine to a British audience for the first time. The volume also contains Spring Awakening, "a work of great compassion that still has a lot to teach us about the dangers of battening down adolescent sex..." (Guardian). The translation of Spring Awakening ("scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry" The Times) was commissioned by the National Theatre and that of Lulu: A Monster Tragedy ("the Bonds' version is sharper and funnier than its predecessors" Guardian) was toured nationally. Both plays are complemented by the translators' historically illuminating introductions.
Presents the details of director Stephen Daldry's work on the acclaimed play, "An Inspector Calls," in an attempt to reveal his intepretative approach to theater
Don Juan’s back from the War and he’s got some catching up to do. Berlin is crumbling, but after years of abstinence, the Don is ready for more of the debauchery that once made his name. Amidst political and economic upheaval, Don Juan finds himself increasingly at odds with the man he used to be. Is this notorious lothario about to experience a sudden change of heart? Ödön von Horváth’s startling tale of displacement and isolation in the aftermath of the Great War is presented in a bold new adaptation by award-winning playwright Duncan Macmillan.
