"A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career. The first full-length play The Ride Across Lake Constance, is one of Handke's best-known works. It deals directly with one of Handke's favorite themes: the realities of theater itself, independent of the offstage world, and the way language (dialogue) and objects (props) operate in the skewed world of the stage. Therein it anticipates They Are Dying Out, the second full-length play in this volume. In some ways more conventional than many of Handke's plays, They Are Dying Out presents one of his most fascinating protagonists, Quitt, a businessman who first induces a group of colleagues to set up a monopoly and then torpedoes the scheme. The four short plays that round out the book--Prophecy, Calling for Help, Quodlibet, and My Foot My Tutor--were written before The Ride Across Lake Constance and show Handke moving from the experimental mode of his early work toward the richness and complexity that have marked him as the most important dramatist since Becket."--Publisher description.

The title refers to the legend of a horseman who rode over the frozen Lake Constance in a snowstorm and dropped dead with fright on the other side on discovering what he had done. In the play a group of characters, known only by the names of the actors who perform the parts, talk and play games together, skating over the thin ice that separates them from unspoken danger.

Presenting a fresh look at postwar theater, this study of the late Sir Nigel Hawthorne's 50-year career in the theater focuses on the personal journey of one of Britain's finest actors. Providing detailed analysis of Hawthorne's stage work, this authorized biography is illuminated and enriched by personal insights derived from Hawthorne's own memories and those of his colleagues. Broad discussions about Hawthorne's personal development as well as the direction stage acting took in the 20th century are integrated with details about the actor's extensive career.

Shines new light on the power and complexity of drama

This critical exploration of modern drama begins with Büchner and Ibsen and then discusses the major playwrights who have shaped modern theater. A new introduction by the author assesses developments of recent years.

Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.

This book considers a spectrum of post-war plays in which characters are created, coerced and destroyed by language.