Guernica and Other Plays: The Labyrinth; The Tricycle; Picnic on the Battlefield; And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers; The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria; Garden of Delights

Guernica and Other Plays: The Labyrinth; The Tricycle; Picnic on ...

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Editorial Reviews

The celebrated Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who lived in Madrid under the oppression of the Franco regime, writes passionately of human atrocity and of hope. This collection of plays embodies Arrabal’s “theatre of panic,” named after the god Pan. The homme panique is a man who refuses to take risks, who avoids danger and therefore heroism, who avoids the irreparable act, but who, ironically, is caught up in a world of chance that forces him to make choices.

Customer Reviews

A familiar absurdity...

Reviewed by Mark Nadja, 2008-03-22

A sort of pale cross between Ionesco and Beckett, Fernando Arrabal is not quite as outrageously absurd as the one or as bleakly ((and blackly)) comic as the other. Still, as derivative as they often seem, these plays are well worth reading and a good deal of fun, too. Arrabal is a playwright of social and political criticism more than existential despair. War, institutional injustice, and poverty concern him more than our place--or lack of one--in the cosmos.

*Guernica,* the title play, is an imaginative dramatization based on the Picasso painting of the same name. It is probably, in its symbolic/allegorical conciseness the most powerful of the group collected here, but probably also the play that loses most on the page. The others depend a little less on the pantomime of the characters--the now familiar hapless bourgeoisie and comical tramps who inhabit the dramas of Ionesco and Beckett respectfully.

Perhaps what does separate Arrabal from his better-known contemporaries is the more pronounced "dream-logic" of his dialogues--characters engage each other in a kind of nonsense language and take with hardly a shrug even death itself. This gives the plays a nightmarish quality as if the characters themselves don't consider themselves real enough to worry about their fates, no matter how awful. Their lives--and their deaths--don't belong to them, but to the state, represented by their coercive functionaries, the military and the police. Struggle against these forces is futile and where any is made it is swiftly stifled by linguistic absurdity: an implacably twisted logic that reinterprets common sense and defies even the evidence of one's own eyes.

All in all, Arrabal is probably not essential reading as are Beckett and Ionesco, in whose works most of Arrabal's themes are treated with greater power and originality, but these plays do have a quirky charm of their own and offer a variation, if slight, on what is by now a fairly well-known theme.

Panic Movement, Bizarro's grampa

Reviewed by Karen Kilpatrick, 2007-07-17

The dazzling panic of Arrabal kisses indiscriminately, gropes in a circle and stumbles into furniture for the benefit of circles, the act of being kissed, and to edify furniture. The clown's revenge molested in a bed of art. Nobel Prize finalist. Poet of the upside-down cacophy.

Refreshing

Reviewed by Clay Bodine, 2002-11-02

I loved this book. It was quirky and compassionate with lots to think about. Like Ionesco and absurdist playwrights, Arrabal shows us our world in a mirror of truth wtih compelling metaphors and solid characters.

Arrabal's greatest work is contained here...

Reviewed by Anonymous, 1999-03-30

Arrabal portrays the inherent sadness in all human beings through these five plays. This is given a lightness of touch however, by the characters contained within, with their childlike wonderment at the absurdity of modern society, especially war. 'Guernica' stands out, by gaining depth with reference to the Picasso painting, paving the way for a more poetic theatre which encompasses all artforms.