AUSTRIA–HUNGARY AUTHOR · DRAMA · TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
Ödön von Horváth
Also known as: Ödön von Horváth, Ödon von Horváth
Austro-Hungarian writer
Most acclaimed
Plays, One
A volume of plays from John Bowen, one of the twentieth century's leading novelists and playwrights. Includes: After the Rain, The Disorderly Women, Little Boxes, and Singles. Bowen’s plays, like his novels, are preoccupied with myth, manipulation and self-deceit.
Plays : two
Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-) deceptions. Inspired by Pinter's clandestine extramarital affair with BBC Television presenter Joan Bakewell, which spanned seven years, from 1962 to 1969, the plot of Betrayal integrates different permutations of betrayal relating to a seven-year affair involving a married couple, Emma and Robert, and Robert's "close friend" Jerry, who is also married, to a woman named Judith. For five years, Jerry and Emma carry on their affair without Robert's knowledge, both cuckolding Robert and betraying Judith, until Emma, without telling Jerry she has done so, admits her infidelity to Robert (in effect, betraying Jerry), although she continues their affair. In 1977, four years after exposing the affair (in 1973) and two years after their subsequent break up (in 1975), Emma meets Jerry to tell him that her marriage to Robert is over.
The eternal philistine
"This important, never-before-translated work by a major yet overlooked mid-20th century writer, is a brutally funny look at the human comedy on the eve of Europe's descent into Fascism. A classic, prescient work of pre-WWII literature by a major Weimar author about a young man who is a failed used car salesman. In search of another means to live the high life, he decides to travel by train from Berlin to Madrid to see the World's Fair--and hopefully meet a beautiful, rich woman who will provide for his every whim. It's a highly stylized, and at times raucously funny, tale of the almost-absurd: a dark and satiric look at Europeans, and especially Germans, from all levels of society on the brink of cataclysmic Fascism. And as such, it is, perhaps, the most significant work of this important writer's oeuvre. Von Horváth's work fearlessly tried to warn of the dangers of rising fascism and the militarization of Europe (which led to his having to flee Germany and Austria suc- cessively). His characters here are adrift in their acquisitive desires, making them vulnerable to the manipulations and propaganda of the State--and making this novel brilliantly foresightful in its understanding of politics and human nature at a crucial point in modern European history"--