Three Plays: The Fire Raisers / Andorra / Triptych

Three contentious and enduring plays about the clash of the individual and society

Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It “is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique” (Edna O’Brien); Andorra is based on the author’s own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a writer grappling with his own mortality.

The flexible and contemporary translations by Michael Bullock (The Fire Raisers, Andorra) and Geoffrey Skelton (Triptych) are here complemented by an introduction by Peter Loeffler.