Five Plays Antigone, Eurydice, The Ermine, The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette

The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) wrote both "pink" bittersweet comedies and "black" tragic dramas.Jean Anouilh Five Playsthe finest English-language anthology of his workscrackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. InAntigone, his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing.Eurydice,The Ermine,The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannetteare the other plays included in this edition. The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) wrote both "pink" bittersweet comedies and "black" tragic dramas.Jean Anouilh Five Playsthe finest English-language anthology of his workscrackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. InAntigone, his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing.Eurydice,The Ermine,The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannetteare the other plays included in this edition. "In Jean Anouilh there is a constant alternation between moods of brave affirmation and bitter protest; affirmation of life's primal glory, protest at what modern urbanparticularly Frenchman has made of it . . . Traditional too in Anouilh is his dramatic formof which he is one of the few remaining masters in the theatre of our time . . . It is essentially the theatre of the mask, the theatre which is an amalgam of ballet, farce, street fair, and improvisationall made to serve the purpose of revealing human truth in the gravest sense. Anouilh calls some of his plays 'black' others 'pink,' but they all sparkle with the glitter of the theatre's cloak of a thousand colors."Harold Clurman

Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the realist works of the previous era with his dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. He used Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris.

"In Jean Anouilh there is a constant alternation between moods of brave affirmation and bitter protest; affirmation of life's primal glory, protest at what modern urban—particularly French—man has made of it . . . Traditional too in Anouilh is his dramatic form—of which he is one of the few remaining masters in the theatre of our time . . . It is essentially the theatre of the mask, the theatre which is an amalgam of ballet, farce, street fair, and improvisation—all made to serve the purpose of revealing human truth in the gravest sense. Anouilh calls some of his plays 'black' others 'pink,' but they all sparkle with the glitter of the theatre's cloak of a thousand colors."—Harold Clurman