New French Plays (Methuen New Theatrescript)

Fostered by Francois Mitterand's supportive Arts policies, the 1980s have seen a florescence of French drama. This anthology offers readers their first opportunity to read in English the works of four outstanding contemporary dramatists. Michel Vinaver's Portrait of a Woman, with seventeen characters to be played by eleven actors, is an intimate study of the motives of a notorious murderess. Raymond Cousse's dramatic monologue Those Childish Things is a poignantly comic, child's-eye view of adult life. Stranger in the House by Richard Demarcy is a 'serie noire' play in which an Arab plays havoc with a French family and Bernard-Marie Koltes's Struggles of the Dogs and the Black, set on a construction site in West Africa, focuses on two men who vie for the favours of a woman, The plays in this volume offer a range of possibilities for both large and small-scale performance.