Six Plays

Fülszöveg

SIX PLAYS by Slawomir Mrozek
Translated by Nicholas Bethell
At 37, the leading playwright of modern Poland, Slawomir Mrozek recently emerged as one of Europe's major new dramatists with the international success of his full-length play Tango in its London, Paris, Düsseldorf, and Warsaw productions. In the one-act plays collected in this volume, as in all of Mrozek's work, perfect logic is rigorously applied to illogical ends: in Police, the last jailed revolutionary threatens to reform, thus making the police obsolete; in Out at Sea, three shipwrecked survivors must decide which one of them will be eaten by the other two; two bureaucrats sharing a hotel room in Enchanted Night conjure up a "dream girl" with their mutual imagination; three bored farm hands in Party initiate a desperate cycle of merry-making that threatens to end in murder; in Charlie, an occulist is asked to fit an old man with glasses to help him shoot the man he wants to murder; and in The Martyrdom of Peter... Tovább

Fülszöveg

SIX PLAYS by Slawomir Mrozek
Translated by Nicholas Bethell
At 37, the leading playwright of modern Poland, Slawomir Mrozek recently emerged as one of Europe's major new dramatists with the international success of his full-length play Tango in its London, Paris, Düsseldorf, and Warsaw productions. In the one-act plays collected in this volume, as in all of Mrozek's work, perfect logic is rigorously applied to illogical ends: in Police, the last jailed revolutionary threatens to reform, thus making the police obsolete; in Out at Sea, three shipwrecked survivors must decide which one of them will be eaten by the other two; two bureaucrats sharing a hotel room in Enchanted Night conjure up a "dream girl" with their mutual imagination; three bored farm hands in Party initiate a desperate cycle of merry-making that threatens to end in murder; in Charlie, an occulist is asked to fit an old man with glasses to help him shoot the man he wants to murder; and in The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey a maharajah and an imaginary tiger hunt down an innocent citizen in his bathroom. Here again, Mrozek shows himself to be an undisputed master of the grotesque, a sharp parodist of politics.
Slawomir Mrozek was born in Poland in 1930. He studied architecture and painting, and has worked as a journalist for various Polish newspapers and periodicals. In 1957, The Elephant was awarded the Polish State Cultural Review's annual literary prize. Translations of his work have appeared in almost every European language, and his plays have been performed in London, New York, Moscow, and Paris, as well as in his native Poland. His full-length play. Tango, is scheduled for New York production, and will soon be published by Grove Press.
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