Playing for Time (NHB Modern Plays) - Softcover

Arthur Miller

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1854590960 ISBN 13: 9781854590961

Publisher: Nick Hern Books, 1990

Synopsis

A stage adaptation by Arthur Miller of his acclaimed 1980 screenplay filmed starring Vanessa Redgrave in the lead role. Playing For Time tells the extraordinary true story of the women's orchestra in Auschwitz. It centers on Fania Fenelon, a Parisian singer, who is arrested by the Nazis, sent to Auschwitz and there finds herself swept into the orchestra, composed entirely of women prisoners and founded to entertain the camp commandants. As long as the orchestra finds favour, its members are spared the gas chambers. They are, quite literally, playing for time.

This extraordinary memoir is rendered here in a deeply moving and inspiring adaptation by Arthur Miller. It takes its place alongside his other plays portraying the individual's struggle to maintain a moral sense of self in the face of overwhelming public events - plays like The Crucible, All My Sons, Broken Glass and his adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People

About this title

Review:

Vintage Miller, homing in, like many of his other works including The Crucible, on an individual standing alone, and undergoing extreme dilemmas of personal conscience in the face of a system run mad. --Independent

Tells the story with memorable simplicity and gravity...As is always the case with Miller, the storytelling is straight as an arrow, but the conundrums are knotty, summed up by the portrayal of Alma Rose, Mahler's niece, who ruled the orchestra with an iron baton and kept the women alive through sheer strength of will...a reminder that the history of both the perpetrators and the victims cannot be whitewashed, and can never be while "someone is watching and remembering." --Guardian

Quite simply a knockout...The emotional impact of this powerful, absorbing production is tremendous...The Playhouse has produced nothing finer in its main house. --The Stage on the Salisbury Playhouse's 2005 production.
Tells the story with memorable simplicity and gravity...As is always the case with Miller, the storytelling is straight as an arrow, but the conundrums are knotty, summed up by the portrayal of Alma Rose, Mahler's niece, who ruled the orchestra with an iron baton and kept the women alive through sheer strength of will...a reminder that the history of both the perpetrators and the victims cannot be whitewashed, and can never be while "someone is watching and remembering." --Guardian

Quite simply a knockout...The emotional impact of this powerful, absorbing production is tremendous...The Playhouse has produced nothing finer in its main house. --The Stage on the Salisbury Playhouse's 2005 production.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 1854590960
• ISBN 13: 9781854590961
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96
• Editor: Fania Fenelon