Arthur Schnitzler

First published for private circulation in Vienna in 1900, Arthur Schnitzler's famous play looks at the sexual morality and class ideology of his day through a series of sexual encounters between pairs of characters. When published publicly in 1903, it became an immediate best-seller, scandalized Viennese society, and a year later was censored. Schnitzler was accused of pornography and worse. In 1922 Freud wrote to him that "you have learned through intuition-though actually as a result of sensitive introspection-everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons." By choosing characters across the social spectrum, La Ronde offers a powerful view of how sexual contact transgresses boundaries of class. Nicholas Rudall's new translation sensitively captures the language distinctions of the representative characters in the play while providing a remarkably playable script. New in the Plays for Performance series.

Eric Bentley's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's classic LA RONDE. "This seems to be Arthur Schnitzler's year in the English-speaking world. In THE BLUE ROOM, we saw all of Nicole Kidman ... in a daring adaptation of one of his most dazzling works for the stage, REIGEN (LA RONDE, ROUND ONE). Ten couples pair up for the ultimate pleasure. One of each continuing with a different partner until in the last scene the prostitute, who has appeared in the first sketch, appears once more." -Peter Gay, The New York Times Book Review "The original play, REIGEN, was kept from the general public by Schnitzler. First, he printed it only privately. Second ... he withheld it from production. In 1920-21 he did allow it to be performed but when the Vienna production resulted in anti-semitic outbursts against the author, he withdrew it once again. He died in 1931 but when I translated REIGEN in the fifties, his son and heir Heinrich still wanted the play withheld, to protect his father's good name and avoid the ugly protests against the show that he thought would inevitably accrue. However, the play was not protected by U S copyright, and I allowed Circle in the Square to produce it. Jos Quintero, as director, had no difficulty showing that this play has little to do with an actress's nudity but much more to do with the Western world's mores and morality, not forgetting that the story is shot through with irony and humor." -Eric Bentley, The New York Times Book Review

Die wichtigsten Werke Arthur Schnitzlers in einem Band: skandalöse Geschichten, abgründige Erkundungen der menschlichen Seele, hellsichtige Reflexionen über die Macht der Sprache. Neben berühmten Texten wie :Reigen9 und :Fräulein Else9 enthält das Lesebuch auch beeindruckende Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, deren Themenspektrum von der Frage nach privatem Glück bis zur Kritik am Ersten Weltkrieg reicht.