Georg kaiser the burghers of calais

Georg kaiser gas
Georg Kaiser was a leading German Expressionist dramatist.
Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser, called Georg Kaiser, was a German dramatist.

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About the Author

In the "GAS trilogy" (The Coral, Gas I, and Gas II) Kaiser's fundamental theme, the regeneration of man, is presented in terms of contemporary social conflicts. The cycle of plays encompasses the entire evolution of capitalism within an abstract scheme. Kaiser was the leading playwright of German show more expressionism and exponent of its meager settings, violent contrasts, and love of the grotesque and shocking, all aimed at arousing in the beholder an intense "awareness of life." His more than 50 plays include every variety of style and subject matter, including social drama, comedy, farce, romance, legend, and history. His characters are types shorn of individual subtleties, embodiments of ideas pure and simple. He died in Switzerland. (Bowker Author Biography)show less

Includes the name: George Kaiser

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The blurb on the back says that the play could be taken as contemporary even 40 years later. Well, another 60 years have passed, and the play, now more than 100 years

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Georg Kaiser

The German playwright Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) was the most gifted and prolific dramatist of the expressionist school. Extremely skillful and inventive, he did more than any other writer, except perhaps Brecht, to transform German theater in the 20th century.

Georg Kaiser was born on Nov. 25, 1878, in Magdeburg, the son of a businessman. He himself entered business and worked from 1898 to 1901 in Buenos Aires. Then, during years of ill health and unemployment, he turned to writing plays—Rektor Kleist (1905) and Die jüdische Witwe (1911; The Jewish Widow) —but attained wide recognition only with Die Bürger von Calais (1913; The Burghers of Calais). This play, ostensibly historical, dramatizes Jean Froissart's tale of the six Calais burghers who were to be surrendered to the English king so that he would spare the city. The play illustrates Kaiser's faith in the emergence of a "New Man," a truly altruistic human being. Kaiser is a great formalist, and The Burghers is a finely chiseled drama full of splendid diction—a series of carefully composed and p

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Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

(1878-1945) German playwright whose work – about seventy plays in all – was central to the German Expressionist movement in the theatre from before World War One; he also wrote the text for three operas by Kurt Weill (1900-1950). After the formally unadventurous Die Korale: Schauspiel in Fünf Akten (performed 1917, Munich; 1917; trans Winifred Katzin as The Coral1963), which comprises the first part of what would become known as the Gas Trilogy, came Gas: Schauspiel in Fünf Akten (performed 28 November 1918 Neues Theater, Frankfurt; 1918; trans Hermann George Scheffauer as Gas, a Play in Five Acts performed 24 November 1923 Birmingham Repertory Theatre; 1924), and Gas, Zweiter Tell: Schauspiel in drei Akten (performed 29 October 1920 Vereinigte Deutsche Theater, Brno, Czechoslovakia; 1920; trans anon as "Gas II" performance not established in Modern Continental Plays1929) [for other trans see Checklist], the second drama set in an abstract Expressionist Near Future, and the