A selection of the most enduring work of one of this century's best-known French playwrights

Jean Anouilh (1910-87) along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, was at the forefront of the post-war generation of playwrights in Paris. In England his plays were championed by Peter Brook. Antigone is a response to the German occupation of France and established his popularity in 1944 (the Germans ironically, thought that it was a pro-Nazi in its portrayal of King Creon and thus allowed its production); Poor Bitos, Anouilh's angriest play explores the act of judicial murder and The Lark is a version of the Joan of Arc story. All three plays show his fondness for reworking myth, history and legend. Meanwhile Leocadia, about an opera singer who dies after a three day love affair with a prince and The Waltz of the Toreadors, about a general whose mistress attempts to prove his wife's infidelity, represent another talent - for ironic, modern comedy."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)

Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux in 1910 and lived for many years in Switzerland until his death in 1987. His best-known plays are: Restless Heart (1934), Dinner with the Family, Traveller without Lu ggage (both 1937) Thieves' Carnival (1938), Leocadia (1939), Point of Departure (Eurydice) (1941), A ntigone (1944), the Rehearsal (1950), The Waltz of the Toreadors (1952), The Lark (1953), Poor Bitos (1956), The Director of the Opera (1973). Methuen publishes two volumes of his collected plays.