Search results for ""author georg kaiser""

"This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five plays ranging from his early work through the time of his prolific maturity in the 1920s to his last period as an exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1945. David and Goliath is set in Denmark and deals with the power of money over men. The President, set in France, is ironical in tone and revolves around a lottery and, once again, the power of money. The Flight to Venice was written at the height of the Expressionist movement in 1922, and is one of the principal plays of the period. One Day in October is highly complex, using nineteenth-century French literary personalities to make points about literary creation and the relationship between art and life. The final play, The Raft of the Medusa, takes its title from Gericault’s painting, and concerns the regeneration of man overlaid with the pessimism of the European struggle."

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"These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kaiser’s vision of the regeneration of man, which he illustrated in his works by a total paring down of detail, penetrating to the core of the matter and revealing man’s true potential. In From Morning to Midnight the cashier, downtrodden victim of the capitalist system, turns bank robber in order to test the power, freedom and happiness that money can bring. His grand gesture of setting himself and others free turns into an odyssey of disillusion and ends in his violent death. The unique stage technique employed by Kaiser is as challenging today as it was when the play was first performed. The Burghers of Calais has always been considered Kaiser’s greatest play and the “classic” of Expressionist drama. In it, Kaiser exploits the non-naturalistic technique of Expressionism. The play embraces vast expansiveness and total concentration, stylized gesture and lengthy monologues."

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