Rappaccini's Daughter

The only play by leading Mexican poet Octavio Paz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

When Giovanni comes to stay in a room overlooking the strange overgrown garden of Dr Rappaccini, he has eyes only for his host's beautiful daughter. But many men before have been warned away from her, and slowly he discovers the terrible truth: that her father is using her as part of an experiment on the human will to live, and has turned her into a living phial of poison.

Octavio Paz's one-act play Rappaccini's Daughter is a dramatic poem about love and the loss of innocence, based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The original play was written in 1956. This English translation by Sebastian Doggart was first performed at the Gate Theatre, London, in January 1996.