Search results for ""Author Frank Wedekind""

Without crime I became a criminal. Without payment I became a whoreMunich, 1906. Klara lives with her singing teacher and his wife. But when a backstreet abortionist is arrested, a secret emerges which theatens to destroy the household's respectability.Frank Wedekind was the great rebel of European theatre, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu Plays. In Musik he delivers a blistering attack on middle-class hyprocrisy and double-standards.This exhiliarating adaptation by Neil Fleming opened The Last Waltz Season at the Arcola Theatre, London in March 2005.

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ÊSpring's AwakeningÊ is a tragi-comedy of teenage sex. Its fourteen-year-old heroine Wendla is killed by abortion pills. The young Moritz terrorized by the world around him and especially by his teachers shoots himself. The ending seems likely to be the suicide of Moritz's friend Melchior but in a confrontation with a mysterious stranger (the famous Masked Man) he finally manages to shed his illusions and face the consequences.

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Spring Awakening is set in a small German town in the 1890s, where adolescent boys and girls grope their way towards knowledge and maturity against the blocks set up by parents and teachers in the name of “morality”. Melchior, fearless in his pursuit of the truth, manages to retain his freedom of spirit, but his friends are not so lucky or strong. Wedekind’s controversial play occupies a special place in modern theatrical history as a key work of the naturalist school and the principal precursor of German Expressionism.

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Two of Wedekind's most seminal plays, Earth-Spirit and Pandora's Box both focus on the actions of the young heroine Lulu, who embodies both animal sensuality and waif-like innocence, as she escapes a life on the streets, receives a society education, marries, takes on various lovers, becomes a dancer in a revue, is imprisoned for murder and encounters Jack the Ripper. When Earth-Spirit was premiered in Leipzig in 1898, Wedekind was vilified and persecuted for advocating unfeigned sexual pleasure and making his heroine a heartless whore. Death and Devil and Castle Wetterstein, the other plays that make up this volume, are essentially extensions of and complementary to the Lulu tragedies.

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Nicholas Wright's version of Wedekind's celebrated erotic masterpiece is the first to be based on the author's original text, restoring the clarity, the daring and the sexual explicitness of a modern masterpiece written a hundred years before its time. Lulu is the story of the decline and fall of a young woman possessed of a fatal combination of sexuality and innocence. She passes from German and Parisian high society to the streets of Jack the Ripper's London – destroying, and ultimately destroyed by, her lovers. Wedekind originally wrote his extraordinary 'monster tragedy' a full twenty years before the First World War. Finding no-one prepared to stage it on account of its sexual candour, he toned it down and rewrote it as two full-length dramas, which is how The Lulu Plays were published and produced throughout most of the twentieth century. Nicholas Wright's version, based on Wedekind's original text, reveals the author's original conception for the play. It was premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2001.

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“At the beginning stands Wedekind.” So wrote German literary critic Rudolf Kayser in 1917 of the new forms of expressionist theater that were then becoming central to German culture. In Schloss Wetterstein (Castle Wetterstein), one of his most important plays, Wedekind offers a satirical take on marriage and the bourgeois nuclear family; at the play’s center is a rebellious teenage girl who turns to prostitution after her upbringing in an unstable household. The play was published in 1912, but a performance ban was put into effect immediately, and continued until after Wedekind’s death.This new edition offers a fresh translation, an illuminating brief introduction, and a selection of background materials that help to set the play in context.

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A Student Edition of Wedekind's classic 1891 expressionist play about adolescent sexuality. Wedekind's notorious play Spring Awakening influenced a whole trend of modern drama and remains relevant to today's society, exploring the oppression and rebellion of adolescents among draconian parents and morals. This seminal work looks at the conflict between repressive adulthood and teenage sexual longings in a provincial German town. Highly controversial and with themes of sexuality, social attitudes and adolescence, the play is a popular and provocative text for study, especially at undergraduate level. This translation by Edward Bond first brought the play to English audiences when it premiered at the National Theatre in 1974. Receiving high praise ('scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry.' The Times), this version is now considered to be the definitive English translation. This Student Edition features expert and helpful annotation, including a scene-by-scene summary, a detailed commentary on the dramatic, social and political context, and on the themes, characters, language and structure of the play, as well as a list of suggested reading and questions for further study and a review of performance history.

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Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Frank Wedekind's famously banned German play written in 1891 focuses on a group of classmates and explores adolescent sexuality and the emotional consequences if suppressed. This edition of Spring Awakening in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is an English translation by Julian Forsyth and Margarete Forsyth.

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