About The Book
The celebrated Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who lived in Madrid under the oppression of the Franco regime, writes passionately of human atrocity and of hope. This collection of plays embodies Arrabal’s “theatre of panic,” named after the god Pan. The homme panique is a man who refuses to take risks, who avoids danger and therefore heroism, who avoids the irreparable act, but who, ironically, is caught up in a world of chance that forces him to make choices.
The collection includes Guernica, an earthy verbal re-creation of Picasso’s famous painting, in which an old Basque couple is caught in the air raids; And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, a violent protest against the Franco regime; the ingenious and poetic The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria; and Garden of Delights, which explores the lesbian tendencies of strong adolescent attachments and the sadomasochistic experience of adult love.
Includes:
Guernica
And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers
The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
Garden of Delights
Praise
“One might describe Arrabal’s writing as a dense and unremitting wave of sperm, saliva, and blood, or as a vein of red and black diamonds, the color of life, of death, and of anarchy.” –Le Quotidien de Paris
“I watched scenes onstage of sodomy, intercourse, defecation, urination, profanity, and nudity, and found them not only acceptable but exactly and most powerfully right. They were right because they were treated on two levels as the stuff of the tortured dreams and hungers of long-time and hopeless prisoners, but also as metaphors of deeper corruptions than sexual ones, the corruptions which express themselves in violence.” –New York Post
“With his plays Arrabal has achieved universal renown.” –El Pais, Madrid
Grove Press
