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The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term to describe a group of radical European playwrights – writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter – whose dark, funny and humane dramas wrestled profoundly with the meaningless absurdity of the human condition. It is a testament to the power and insight of Martin Esslin's landmark work, originally published in 1961, that its title should enter the English language in the way that it has. Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series with a new preface by Marvin Carlson, The Theatre of the Absurd remains to this day a clear-eyed work of criticism on a compelling period of European writing.
This book of criticism brings both theatre and film studies within a single theoretical framework.
A volume of plays from the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, including his most popular and controversial work A Penguin Classic Pirandello is brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So), the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover “the truth” about the Ponza family. Each of these...
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Having spent most of his career working with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Martin Esslin appraises American TV with the eyes of both a detached outsider and a concerned insider. "American popular culture," writes Esslin, "has become the popular culture of the world at large. American television is thus more than a purely social phenomenon. It fascinates and in some instances frightens the whole world." The Age of Television discusses television as an essentially dramatic form of communication, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses that spring from its character. It explores its impact on generations destined to grow up under its influence, with such questions as how TV turns...
This text is Brecht's series of 24 inter-connected playlets that describe events which took place in German households before his own exile in 1936. They describe the suspicion and anxiety experienced by people as the power of Hitler grew.
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Updated to cover Harold Pinter's most recent plays, including Mountain Language, The New World Order and Party Time, this revised edition offers a comprehensive survey of the whole span of Pinter's writing career.