Selected Plays 1999-2009
San Diego; Outlying Islands; Pyrenees; The American Pilot; Being Norwegian; Kyoto; Brewers Fayre
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
David Greig: Plays 1 brings together four key plays by the playwright described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation'.
In Outlying Island two young Cambridge ornithologists are sent to a remote island. Together with its authoritarian leaseholder and his niece they observe an innocence that is about to be destroyed forever. San Diego offers a strange and occasionally nightmarish journey into the heart of the contemporary American dream, weaving together stories of illegal immigrants, of film stars and whores, and even of the playwright himself. Pyrenees follows a man found lying in the snow in the foothills as he tries to piece together his identity. In The American Pilot a crash-landing in a remote valley in a distant country raises questions about how the world sees America and how America sees the world.
The collection also includes a trilogy of short plays, Being Norwegian, Kyoto and Brewers Fayre, published here for the first time.
Outlying Island
'I can't recommend it highly enough . . . A rich, charged play, veering between the comic and the poetic as innocence gives way to experience.' Telegraph
San Diego
'A surreal and intriguing piece of theatre . . . dazzling . . . Home and awake from the mythical dream that is San Diego, the name David Greig remains imprinted on our minds.' Independent
Pyrenees
'All the wit and intelligence of previous works, probing away at concerns that are both contemporary and timeless...A classy, rewarding, engaging drama, Greig's best to date.' The Times
The American Pilot
'One of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around. A richly provocative new play.' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raised in Northern Ireland and long resident in New Jersey, Muldoon (Horse Latitudes) remains one of very few poets who commands broad and deep respect on both sides of the Atlantic. This first full-length outing since he took the poetry editorship at the New Yorker will certainly hold the attention of devotees, and individual poems, as always, shine: sestinas, monorhymed works and especially sonnets (including a fine translation of Baudelaire's "The Albatross" and a diptych entitled "Nope" and "Yup") make Muldoon's acrobatic technique serve his strikingly playful yet grim sensibility. As he has throughout his career, the poet explores his "dual role/ as proven escape artist and proven identity switcher": domestic discord, ecodisaster, and the simple fear of death compete to propel these sometimes frightening lines. Yet fans who have defended Muldoon against accusations of frivolity, of complexity for complexity's sake, may have a hard time defending his latest work. Shaggy-dog stories, sequences driven by repetitions, and meta-meta-poetry ("Far too late to inquire/ why a poem had taken a wrong turn") predominate, while the strongest work conveys a barely deflected despair about art itself: "I'm waiting for some lover/ to kick me out of bed," one sonnet muses, "for having acted on a whim// after I've completely lost the thread."
