Enda Walsh is an Irish-born playwright, a fact immensely bothersome to those seeking to place him alongside his birth nation's similarly defined theatrical forbears. Great acrobatic skill goes into locating the Synge in his characters' souls, the Keats in their speech. For Walsh is sim
The back jackets of much of Thomas Bernhard's English-language translations are burdened by such qualifications as "near genius" or "second only to Kafka and Beckett." This, of course, is no small praise: there is no shame in being second to Kafka or Beckett; there is no shame in being a "ne
As with any movement of which its title and ideological thrust is foisted unwittingly and often unwarrantedly upon its supposed members, the Theater of the Absurd is as awkward and uneasy a fit for Eugène Ionesco's literary and artistic endeavors as they are for Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet
'Moli're was not just a playwright,' wrote scholar Ethan Mordden. 'Moli're was a thespian, wholly of the theater, and his compositions breach the gulf between literature and performance, between language as its own art and language as a tool of art.' Like Shakespeare, who was an actor first, Moli're