Three European Plays - Ring Round the Moon, The Queen and the Rebels, In Camera ( Penguin Plays )

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Jean Anouilh

Ugo Betti

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Becket (Modern World Literature) (French Edition)

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Nelson Thornes Ltd

The Lark

A sensitive play describing the life of Joan of Arc from her youthful visions to the trial for heresy

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

Becket or The Honor of God

Riverhead Books

In this four-act play, Jean Anouilh expresses his almost revolutionary point of view about Becket, the twelfth-century English bishop. This was a highly successful theatrical production that became an equally popular film. "Becket, ou l'Honneur de Dieu," staged by Jean Anouilh and Roland Piétri, was first presented in Paris on October 8, 1959, at the Théâtre Montparnasse-Gaston Baty. The play was produced in New York in 1960, with Anthony Quinn in the role of Henry Plantagenêt and Laurence Olivier as Thomas à Becket. The Paramount film production starred Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. An 11-page Introduction by the editors (in English) presents vital background information on the play and its author.

Becket, ou l'Honneur de Dieu

Contemporary

Appleton, Century, Crofts

Antigone was originally produced in Paris in 1942, when France was occupied and part of Hitler's Europe. The play depicts an authoritarian regime which mirrors the predicament of the French people of the time. Based on Sophocles' ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone which was first performed in Athens in the 5th century BC, its theme was nevertheless topical. For in Antigone's faithfulness to her dead brother and his proper burial and her reiterated "No!" to the dictator Creon, the French audience saw its own resistance to the German occupation. The Germans allowed the play to be performed presumably because they found Creon's arguments for dictatorship so convincing. The play is regularly performed and studied around the world. "Anouilh is a poet, but not a poet of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing" Peter Brook

Antigone

METHUEN

Director of the Opera (Modern Plays)

'Anouilh is a poet, but not of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing' Peter Brook
 Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the mundane realist works of the previous era with his innovative dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris and provoked fierce controversy. In defying the tyrant Creon and going to her death, Antigone conveyed to Anouilh's compatriots a covert message of heroic resistance; but the author's characterisaation of Creon also seemed to exonerate Marshal Petain and his fellow collaborators. More ambivalent than his ancient model, Sophocles, Anouilh uses Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. 
 Commentary and notes by Ted Freeman.

Antigone (Methuen Drama, Methuen Student Edition)

Reference

A C Black Publishers Ltd

“Poor Bitos” is the strongest and most strikingly contemporary of Jean Anouilh’s plays. With freezing precision and extraordinary theatrical skill, Anouilh here exposes the evil at the heart of political extremism, with specific reference to the French people but with implications that are tragically universal. The principal character is one André Bitos, a thin-lipped, Eichmann-like public prosecutor with a fanatical sense of justice that outrages every normal feeling of compassion. Bitos since the close of World War II has made it his gruesome business to track down fellow countrymen suspected of collaborating with the Germans and to bring about their execution. In a searing flashback to the Reign of Terror, Anouilh demonstrates that the lethal virtue of men like Bitos and Robespierre – inflexible Puritans dedicated to the total destruction of evil, without compromise and without mercy – threatens the very foundations of civilized life. No other play has given us such a profound and revealing exploration of the socio-psychological roots of the self-righteous fanaticism that has swept the world in the postwar era.

Poor Bitos

Coward, McCann

Voyageur Sans Bagage (Methuen's Twentieth Century French Texts)

Routledge

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Books by Jean Anouilh