Le Professeur Taranne (Twentieth Century Texts) - Softcover

Adamov and Arrabal have achieved recognition as perhaps the two most important avant-garde French playwrights, after Beckett and Ionesco, to have adopted and developed the Absurdist' style of the New Theatre.
The first of the one-act plays in this volume is Adamov's Le Professeur Taranne, a Kafkaesque black comedy, featuring a man alone, fighting to clear himself of charges made by the police. He becomes increasingly desperate to achieve recognition of his worth and integrity by society, and to establish his very identity. Arrabal's Pique-Nique en Campagne concerns a romp on a battlefield. It has the appeal of a Lewis Carroll nonsense story, but it also has more Serious overtones as an early application of Arrabal's 'panic' ideas and as a lively denunciation of war.
In a full introduction Professor Norrish examines the place of Adamov and Arrabal in the history of twentieth-century drama. He describes productions of the plays and explains ,the two playwrights' attitudes and approaches to theatre, with special reference to their early work.