The Physicists: A Play in Two Acts - Softcover

Friedrich Durrenmatt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0573013403 ISBN 13: 9780573013409

Publisher: Samuel French Ltd, 1998

Synopsis

This 59 page play published by Samuel French, entitled 'The Physicists' by Friedrich Durrenmatt (translated by James Kirkup), was originally presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre on 9th January 1963 and was directed by Peter Brook and designed by John Bury. The play has 4 female roles and 16 male roles. The female parts are: Marta Boll, the Matron; Fraulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd, alienist; Frau Lina Rose; and Monika Stettler, a nurse. The male roles are: Police Inspector Richard Voss; Blocher, a police photographer; Guhl, a police stenographer; 1st Policeman; 2nd Policeman; Police Doctor; Herbert Georg Beutler (Newton), a patient; Ernst Heinrich Ernesti (Einstein), a patient; Oskar Rose, missionary and husband of Frau Lina Rose; Adolf-Friedrich, Wilfried-Kaspar, and Johan Wilhelm (the three sons of Frau Lina Rose and Oskar Rose); Johan Wilhelm Mobius, a patient; Uwe Sievers, chief male attendant; McArthur, a negro male attendant; Murillo, a male attendant. The synopsis of scenes is that the action of the play passes entirely in the drawing-room of a "villa" belonging to the private sanatorium known as "Les Cerisiers". Act I: About 4.30 on an afternoon in November. The immediate neighbourhood is an unspoiled lakeside that gradually deteriorates into a built-up area and then a medium-sized town. The villa in whose drawing room the action takes place is in what would have formerly been called a "madhouse". It was once the Zahnd summer residence and was where once all the patients of the establishment's founder Fraulein Doktor Mathilde von Zahnd were housed: e.g. decayed aristocrats; arterio-sclerotic politicians; debilitated millionaires; schizophrenic writers; maniac depressive industrial barons and so on; in short, the mentally disturbed elite of half the Western World. Act II: An hour later. Time - the present. Includes a staging plan; furniture and property list; lighting plot and effects plot

About this title

About the Author:

Friedrich Durrenmatt was born in Switzerland in 1921 and has long been considered one of the world's leading German-language playwrights. His plays have received international acclaim, with The Visit, Romulus the Great, and The Physicists having been performed on Broadway and in major capitals throughout the world. D�rrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Durrenmatt died in December 1990. Joel Agee is the author of two memoirs, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In The House Of My Fear. His translations of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea and Hans Erich Nossack's Der Untergang won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Lois Roth Prize of the Modern Language Association, respectively. In 2007 he was a finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and received the Alta National Translation for his translation of the Selected Writings of Friedrich D�rrenmatt.

From the Back Cover:

The Physicists is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of Europe's foremost dramatists and author of the internationally celebrated The Visit.

About this edition

• Publisher: Samuel French Ltd
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0573013403
• ISBN 13: 9780573013409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 58