Product Description
A selection of the most enduring work of one of this century's best-known French playwrights This selection of plays by Jean Anouilh (1910-87), includes The Rehearsal ('quintissential Anouilh', Herald Tribune); Becket ('witty, intelligent, full of repartee and irreverence' Financial Times); The Orchestra (a play within a concert), together with Eurydice, an ironic modern reworkng of the myth ('a fascinating piece', Financial Times)."Anouilh is a poet but not a poet of words, he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing." (Peter Brook) ... Read more

Product Description
These original plays and novels accompanied by French-English vocabularies and a variety of pedagogical apparatus, are appropriate as intermediate or advanced readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great
I loved it and I would like others to read it also! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

C'est MAGNIFIQUE!
I had to read this book for French class and found it to be the best French book I'd ever read. The play is wonderful with its use of flashbacks and the ending is just wonderful even though its not how it was in history.It makes the whole story seem hopeful, as it should be and not sad, whichis how most people perceive the story of Jeanne d'Arc. I highly recommendthis book!

Quotable Quotes
This was a very excellent book! It is about Joan of Arc, told in dialogue as a character reenactment. The book is filled with passages of great insight spouted by this young girl while she is on trial for heresy. Shesays much concerning religion and God and also of fear and loyalty. Thereis some humor as well. The end, although not completely historicallyaccurate, is made so on purpose, demonstrating the author's existentialistbeliefs. He believes it is better to die for one's cause than live withouta cause. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One of the Best Backstage Stories
I composed and played music for a college production of this play when I was a freshman at Cooper Union in the early 1960s. It's one of the best backstage stories ever written, and right up there with the wittiest.

The story is a wry and convincing critique of middle-class values. The protagonist, Julien, represents the latter, while his wife Colombe, whom he raises from a flower girl to an actress in his bohemian mother's acting company, comes in the course of the play to make a reasonable case for what polite society would characterize as amorality.

The young Julie Harris was the original English-language Colombe. See it if you can, or at least read it. The fact that it's not included in most selected editions of Anouilh bespeaks more of the excellence of all of the author's writings than it does any deficiencies in Colombe. It's an unjustly neglected masterpiece. ... Read more