Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi Three Translations From the Cutting Ball Theater translated by Rob Melrose $18.00 (paperback) at Amazon.com CLICK TO PURCHASE
WOYZECK,
PELLEAS AND MELISANDE, UBU ROI
Three Translations From the Cutting Ball Theater
By Rob Melrose
New translations of three classic modernist plays: Woyzeck by
Georg Büchner, Pelleas and Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck,
and Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry; with a foreword by Oskar Eustis,
an Introduction by Paul Walsh, and an Afterword by Rob Melrose
- FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY PAUL WALSH:
- "Born in 1813, (Büchner) died when he was only 24, leaving Woyzeck an unfinished crossword puzzle of short scene and fragments that anticipate the dramaturgy of the late 20th century. Scholars have stewed over the four manuscripts that Büchner left at his death, amplifying and codifying, rearranging and revising, but only performance on stage can bring Büchner's play to life as the text printed here does. Woyzeck was published posthumously in 1879 and received its first performance on November 8, 1913 at Munich's Residenztheater. Since then it has been embraced as a defining text of the modernist avant-garde, staged around the world and heralded as a forerunner of all that came after it. It is epic in scope and structure, though it focuses on a single individual caught in the web of life. It creates its story through a seemingly haphazard series of scenes, each composed as a "slice of life." Here, as in Pelleas and Melisande, a man murders the woman he loves; and here, as in Maeterlinck's play, the reasons seem insufficient. We are left feeling both helpless and inadequate: baffled by actions we can forgive but not explain.
"Büchner's play tells of a man brutalized by society, by doctors and by the army, until he himself becomes the brutalizer. In a sense, Woyzeck becomes an ogre like Father Ubu in Jarry's play or Golaud in Maeterlinck's. His actions, like theirs, are implacable but understandable, and hold a mirror up to our own inexplicable but understandable cruelties. We search the play for reasons, rearranging the fragments, reinterpreting the clues, but are met each time with the same unanswerable questions that plague us in life. This too is a paradigmatic story for the modern age....
- "To bring these three plays together into a single volume is to embrace a heritage of modernist experiment, left us by young men in their 20s living in the 19th century. It is a heritage that redefined risk as it redefined theater and the purposes it serves. And it is this that makes this volume so valuable. We are invited to see these plays that defined the theater of today afresh, in a language that is both immediate and theatrical, and embrace the risk they celebrate as our own. And isn't that what we should expect from a new translation? To experience again as new those very things that helped shape who we are?"
-- from the introduction by Paul Walsh
Associate Professor (adjunct) of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism
Yale School of Drama- FROM THE TRANSLATOR'S NOTES:
- "Born in 1813, (Büchner) died when he was only 24, leaving Woyzeck an unfinished crossword puzzle of short scene and fragments that anticipate the dramaturgy of the late 20th century. Scholars have stewed over the four manuscripts that Büchner left at his death, amplifying and codifying, rearranging and revising, but only performance on stage can bring Büchner's play to life as the text printed here does. Woyzeck was published posthumously in 1879 and received its first performance on November 8, 1913 at Munich's Residenztheater. Since then it has been embraced as a defining text of the modernist avant-garde, staged around the world and heralded as a forerunner of all that came after it. It is epic in scope and structure, though it focuses on a single individual caught in the web of life. It creates its story through a seemingly haphazard series of scenes, each composed as a "slice of life." Here, as in Pelleas and Melisande, a man murders the woman he loves; and here, as in Maeterlinck's play, the reasons seem insufficient. We are left feeling both helpless and inadequate: baffled by actions we can forgive but not explain.
"Woyzeck is a mysterious play. Büchner started writing the play in 1836 and left it unfinished when he died a year later. He left four drafts behind and scholars, editors, and translators have puzzled over what to do with those four drafts ever since. For years the thinking was that these four drafts were equal fragments and it was up to the editor to piece together a play from the twenty-five odd scenes set down in these texts. Now scholars believe that the fourth draft was his final draft for publication. This draft only goes to scene seventeen, which means that a play for performance needs to use material from the earlier drafts even to have an hour-long play.
"This translation came from the facsimile edition of Büchner's drafts in Büchner's own handwriting and was created for The Cutting Ball Theater. It is decidedly a play for performance. For this version Büchner's fourth draft is considered to be the final word and it follows the scene order he set down there.
"Büchner writes in short clipped short sentences, which some translators have interpreted as his attempt to capture the Hessian dialect. Many have tried to find a similar lower-class dialect in English for Woyzeck and Marie. This translation tries to capture some of the same sounds and sentence structures in English. So rather than trying to find an equivalent dialect in English, this translation tries to get as close as possible to the way Büchner's writing sounds in German.
- "Short and unfinished as it may be, Woyzeck is an extraordinary
play. Each compact scene is full of ideas, action, character, and emotion.
At the same time, however, it is asking for a director to decide what
kind of play it is. Is it a naturalistic play? Is it an expressionistic
play? Is it about class? Is it about man vs. animal? Is it about sex
and jealousy? Is it about the military? Is it about science?"
Rob Melrose, translator
Artistic Director, Cutting Ball Theater
- FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY OSKAR EUSTIS:
- "Rob Melrose is a kind of magician, and his theater, Cutting Ball, is one of the most exciting and integrity-filled enterprises going in the sometimes-shabby field of the American theater. These translations, lucid and sharp, are a beautiful testimony to the value of Rob's achievement."
-- from the forward by Oskar Eustis
artistic director of the Public Theatre
New York City
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