Five Plays: Antigone, Eurydice, the Ermine, the Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette

The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) wrote both "pink" bittersweet comedies and "black" tragic dramas. Jean Anouilh Five Plays--the finest English-language anthology of his works--crackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. In Antigone, his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing. Eurydice, The Ermine, The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette are the other plays included in this edition.

Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the realist works of the previous era with his dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. He used Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris.