Six Plays of Witkacy
A hunchbacked Richard III sits in a Gothic hall, guarded by masked murderers. A dead wife walks back into her manor house to settle accounts with the living. Pope Julius II argues about art with a painter who wants nothing to do with him. A poet locked in a madhouse falls in love with the nun sent to calm him. A cobbler and his apprentices start a revolution while a duchess with bat wings looks on.
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, wrote these plays between 1920 and 1934 for a theatre that did not yet exist. They grow out of his theory of Pure Form, which held that a play should move its audience the way a painting does, through the shape of the whole rather than the logic of the plot. The result is farce, metaphysics, nightmare and cabaret at once, and it reached the territory of the Theatre of the Absurd decades before Ionesco and Beckett got there.
This collection brings together The New Deliverance, In the Manor, Cuttlefish, The Madman and the Nun, The Mother and Cobblers. Adam Czasak translated them from Witkacy's manuscripts and first editions, and his introduction and notes guide the reader through the life, the ideas and the language of one of the strangest and most original writers of twentieth-century Europe.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
